The Earth as a Gift-Giving Ancestor
| Author | Anatoli Ignatov |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716656461 |
| Subject Matter | Nature Returns |
research-article2016
Nature Returns
Political Theory
2017, Vol. 45(1) 52 –75
The Earth as a
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591716656461
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Nietzsche’s
Perspectivism and
African Animism
Anatoli Ignatov1
Abstract
This article puts into conversation Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism and
a particular expression of “African animism,” drawn from my ethnographic
fieldwork in Ghana. Nietzsche’s perspectivism extends interpretation
beyond the human species into natural processes. Like perspectivism, African
animism troubles the binaries—body/soul, nature/culture—that permeate
anthropocentric thinking. Human-nonhuman relations are refigured as socio-
ecological relations: the earth may be regarded as life-generating ancestors;
baobab trees may approach humans as kin. These two images of the world
intersect, but they do not mesh together. Nietzsche adopts perspectivism
as active intersections between dynamic processes, within an open universe
that has not been predesigned for humans. Animism tends toward a world of
personalized relationships that would reach harmony if we would only lighten
our ecological footprint. I draw upon such resonances to advance a new ethic
of experiential environmentalism that treats ecological threats as lived risks
and shared experiences with a lively and communicating “environment.”
Keywords
African animism, environmental political theory, ethnography, giving
environment, Nietzsche, perspectivism
1Sustainable Development Department, Appalachian State University, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Anatoli Ignatov, Sustainable Development Department, Appalachian State University, 305
Bodenheimer Drive, Boone, NC 28608, USA.
Email: anatoli@appstate.edu
Ignatov
53
Ancestral tree (tingane). Image: author.
The elder led us to a lonely baobab tree by the entrance of the chief’s com-
pound in Northern Ghana. This tree, he explained, is one of the ancestors
(yaaba). See the strip of cloth draped around the tree? The yaaba requested a
smock as a gift for the tree’s assistance and blessings. How does one know
what the tree wants? By asking the soothsayer: “the tree is saying that you
have to perform sacrifices to it. Give me a goat or a cow . . . give me a shirt
or a smock. So you have to . . . You know, you cannot buy a big smock to put
on so you have to give something that signifies that that is the smock.” 1
When the Gurensi make such offerings, the ancestors tend, in return, to
deliver prosperity, riches, children, and good harvests, for these practices are
54
Political Theory 45(1)
part of an economy organized around gift exchanges between land, natural
forces and objects, ancestors, and living humans. The tree gives to the farm-
ers, the farmers to the earth priest (tindaana), and the earth priest to the tin-
gane. The land’s abundance and fertility reflect the moods and strategies of
the yaabas: society is healthy when the yaabas are well-disposed. 2
The Gurensi economy embodies a few of the intuitions of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra. After a ten-year stay in the mountains, Zarathustra re-enters the
human world in response to the crisis of nihilism and the inability of human
beings to “overcome themselves.” Full of love, friendship, and a spirit of
gift-giving, he offers the world the overflow of wisdom gained in and from
the mountains. He wants to share it with all, just as nature does: “like figs,
these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and their sweet
flesh!” and the outflow of his teachings is adapted to the metabolic flow of
the gift-giving earth. 3 He is, indeed, a “north wind to ripe figs.” Like the
fertile womb of the Gurensi tiƞa (earth), ripe figs contain seeds of wisdom
and intergenerational change that the wind bestows upon the “fathers and
forefathers of the overman.”4 Zarathustra acts simultaneously as an ancestral
and natural force. As “north wind” he impersonates Wotan, the continental
Germanic god of madness, intoxication, vegetation, oracles, and secret
knowledge. Wotan has only one eye and carries a spear. The other eye was
given up at the base of the World Ash Tree so that Wotan could drink from
the stream of wisdom and break a branch from the tree to make his spear.5
Wotan is the turbulent movement after a long standstill or tension: like the
sea levels that rise and break loose after a century-long accumulation of
greenhouse gases, Wotan’s powers become manifest when things reach criti-
cal mass and cross a threshold.6 Thus Zarathustra’s gifts are often gifts that
mark a passage from one state of equilibrium to another and that bestow
new identities. 7Like the Gurensi earth priest and soothsayer, Zarathustra
straddles multiple worlds: he shifts back and forth between the perspectives
of people, animals, plants, and natural forces.
Both Zarathustra and the African earth priest understand the earth as a tur-
bulent, gift-giving ancestor (and not only a material context for human action),
and both present sustainable living not as an amended “lifestyle” but as a web
of long-term interactions with earth. The hope is that such cross-cultural
encounters may transform both Western and African perspectives, diversify
the resources available for contemporary environmental action, and illuminate
the question of living well within the earth’s means. This question looms large
today as Zarathustra’s most powerful companions—the eagle and the lion—
struggle to rebound from the endangered species list and the Gurensi tingana
are being fenced in to become sites of biodiversity conservation.
Ignatov
55
In contrast to both environmental managerial strategies aimed at resource
efficiency and risk management and attempts to extend duties, rights, and
obligations to nonhumans, Zarathustra and the Gurensi tindaana offer an
ecological understanding that proceeds from the mutuality and sociability
between people, animals, plants, and the land. Baobab trees and the savanna
are human in the same way that dead ancestors are the living environment;
people and environment are experienced as part of each other, and as
enmeshed in a web of active, sometimes whimsical, agencies that they are
obliged to interpret and negotiate together; humans do not work on or against
the environment, but with it in continuous, albeit not always harmonious,
intercourse. 8 In such conversations, both Zarathustra and the tindaana
acknowledge nonhuman beings as kin, adversaries, or allies who hold points
of view worthy of respect and contestation. 9
As I read them, Gurensi animism and Nietzschean perspectivism are two
related forms of experiential environmentalism, in which humans receive
ethical and practical cues from a lively and communicative “environment.” 10
Climate change, deforestation, disease, and species loss become perceived
not merely as ecological degradation, but as the erosion of cross-species rela-
tionships. A rupture in the body of nature implies a breakdown of ethical
order; the sickness of an individual is symptomatic of the sickness of the
world around him; human fertility is bound to the regenerative capacities of
the earth. One of the proper tasks of this environmentalism is to find ways to
intensify the human experience of interconnections between living and non-
living beings and to sharpen our perception of the “messages” from the envi-
ronment. For the Gurensi, this awareness of living within ecologies of
beings—the communion of experience that lies at the heart of animist social-
ity—is the result of practical involvement with the plants, animals, and
ancestors who cohabit the spaces of everyday life. 11 For Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, a self-conscious effort is required to forge a sensibility capable
of discerning the presence of multiple degrees of agency distributed along a
continuum of humans and nonhumans.
If animism and perspectivism are not only sets of beliefs but also modes
of perception immanent to relations with earthen beings and forces, are they
something that we do? If so, does that mean we can’t understand them unless
we do them? My intuition is that the encounter between Zarathustra and the
earth priest renders more perceptible subliminal aspects of what we have
been doing all along. The encounter troubles the anthropocentric presump-
tion that humans always have to speak on behalf of nonhumans, or that the
latter always need the former to empower them to speak. For Nietzsche and
the earth priest, human–environment interactions are less a question of trans-
lation or representation and more an issue of becoming attuned to ongoing
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Political Theory 45(1)
exchanges of interpretation and perspective. The earth is already speaking.
Are we listening and responding appropriately? We don’t generally think
what human beings mean to the earth, plants, and animals or how the nonhu-
man world perceives us. If we take seriously the challenging idea that inter-
pretation runs “both ways” and that the earth, plants, and animals keep
sending us warnings, then perspectivism and animism together might provide
a cross-cultural blueprint for responding to ecological problems: What if we
understood hurricanes as if they were votes on corporate-driven energy poli-
cies? Or as the ancestors’ enunciations of radical calls to political action and
ethical reform? Do droughts constitute the earth’s...
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