With its myriad of relationships, my study considers the Laich-Kwil-Tach enlivened world in which multiple beings bring meaning and understanding to life. Through exploration of Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology I engage with the theoretical concepts of animism, historical ecology and political ecology, in what I call relational ecology. Here, I examine the divide between the relational world and what Western ontology considers a natural resource; fish. Through an analysis of ethnographic texts I work to elucidate the 19th-century human-fish relationship and through collaboration with Laich-Kwil-Tach Elders, based on Vancouver Island on the Northwest Coast of North America, I seek to understand how the 19th-century enlivened world informs 21st-century Laich-Kwil-Tach ontology. In this ethnographic and ethnohistorical account of the relationship between Laich-Kwil-Tach people and fish I grapple with the question of how, within a framework of ontological difference, we can better understand foundations of Indigenous rights and find ways to respect and give agency to multiple forms of knowledge in practice. In the spirit of reconciliation, decolonization and a renewed understanding of ontological multiplicity we are challenged to create analytical frameworks that include both human and nonhuman interests and relationships. Doing so requires engagement with any number of ontological propositions and it requires a confrontation with hegemonic ontological assumptions inherent in the Western scientific, bureaucratic and legal paradigms. By accepting western-based science as one among many ways of producing knowledge, space is made for other forms of knowledge. In the process we are better able to respect Indigenous land and marine tenure systems, as well as the Indigenous right to maintain a long-standing and on-going relationship with other beings and all that this entails. / Graduate

La théorie du comportement du consommateur s’est considérablement enrichie ces dernières années. Toutefois malgré une progressive intégration des éléments ayant trait au corps, aux émotions et aux affects, la question de l’animisme et des comportements y relevant reste impensée. Un faisceau d’indices probants inclinent pourtant à poser que certaines expériences de consommation seraient rattachables à cette vision du monde. L’objectif de cette thèse estdès lors d’en traquer les manifestations, notamment dans un environnement occidental prétendument acquis à une cosmovision naturaliste. A terme ce travail souhaite suggérer un renouvellement paradigmatique permettant d’intégrer cet impensé. / The purpose of our work is to investigate the concept of animism in marketing. The theory of the consumption’s behavior is almost totally dependent on the classic rationality. Now, in the reality, in situation of consumption – including research, data processing and decision -, actors mobilized other forms of rationalities. It’s the case with the animism behavior and mystical participation, still heard mythical, mythological, magical or symbolic thought, that emphasizing the contrast between the mainstream of classical thought and the strong reality hidden of behavior. In this perspective, we propose to build an island of rationality around these concepts. This new paradigm in marketing, looks promising for the study of those « forgotten » of the consumption’s behavior.

Title: Imagination in Art Summary: This thesis deals with the concept of imagination in terms of psychological and philosophical. Regarded the function of imagination in the development of the child's personality in relation to film and audiovisual production. It represents the relationship of imagination and the film and audiovisual works on selected examples from the period of experimental film and animation, surrealist and avant-garde work to video art. Educational section provides insight into the current approach to film and audio-visual education and the concept of creativity in Art education. It further states examples from practice. Keywords: Imagination, Film and audiovisual Education, Art Education, creativity, animism

<p>This thesis project aims to create an animistic system for remote workers to promote a healthier work style and more interactions between remote workers and their colleagues. The Covid-19 pandemic since 2020 resulted in a significant increase in employees who started to work remotely, and with that came the benefits and challenges. Working from home allows remote workers to work with higher productivity and a more flexible schedule and improves the work and life balance of the remote workers. However, major communication issues were reported due to asynchronous working pace and less in-person interaction, which became a significant challenge for remote working. Other remote working challenges include difficulties setting up a home office, health concerns such as sedentariness and hydropenia, higher worker self-discipline requirements, etc. In this thesis, I took the approach of animistic design, focused on the context of a home office environment, and created an interactive system, Planto, a planter and mobile application system designed to improve the work-from-home experience. This thesis presents the Planto system’s research and design process, including literature review, peer product review, user research, ideation, the iterative process of a mobile application design and a product design, and a heuristic evaluation to assess the quality of the design outcome. Planto system seamlessly integrates product design, animistic design, and IoT design. More importantly, it aims to facilitate the complicated work-from-home experience, and the medium is a simple planter.</p>

On the brink of a sixth mass extinction, I renegotiate, through crafting, some basic assumptions on which our economy-culture is built, those of separation and dominance. The project Till Källan / Water Talks is based on a method where I ask various places what they would want me to do on site. It is a process of reconnecting to place and the non-human, a radical rethinking of relationship between human and the other. I investigate the possibilities of craft to be a conductor of that relationship.The paper tracks various lines of thought around my practice, like trickles gathering more water into my pond. It starts in a quantum physics philosophical base for how the world is in a state of becoming through intra-action, on to why water is the perfect medium to affect the world through a puddle. I look at how my practice has an affinity with animism as philosophy and indigenous ways of relating to place and materials. I explore various facets of performativity, in world-making, craft-making, in the resulting objects and in the restoring of relationship through ritual. The enquiry that runs through the paper is what craft is when the object was made for a place rather than for the “art-world” or other economic systems. Going back and forth between a western and a non-western mindset, between practice and theory and between the poetic and prosaic, makes for a synthesizing of sources, leading up to the concept of Rewilding Craft, and a number of crafted objects and images that speak of the relationship.

The dissertation component of this Master’s degree explores the animist ethic in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness; more specifically it will examine how an animist cosmology underlies many of the ethical values in the text in particular those that guide an alternative to the globalising forces of capitalism through a co-operative, eco-friendly solution. By paying attention to the features in the text that could be called animist, in other words the interaction with non-human persons including plants, animals, geological features and ancestral spirits, this dissertation argues that these features are central to the transformation of the protagonist. Camagu’s journey involves a search for belonging that leads him into a network of relationships in Qolorha-By-Sea, which he can only navigate once he enters into his role as a mediator and becomes an exponent of certain ancestral beliefs. I shall argue that this role necessitates an openness and an acceptance of the ambiguity and uncertainty of certain human and non-human relationships. This ambiguity necessarily produces an attitude of openness and awareness in the novel’s central characters that informs the novel’s ecological ethic and expands our notions of inequality to include the more-than-human. Primarily, this dissertation argues that Mda imagines a way of bringing a cultural, animist, world view into the present as a conception of inequality that extends beyond the human. In accompaniment to this dissertation is my own Speculative Fiction novel, Why The River Runs, which is also concerned with what accepting an animist worldview means for my protagonists. The novel explores the mental health struggles of the main protagonist and relates them to the alienating and harmful experience of living under capitalism while also following the second protagonist’s journey through an ancestral calling to become a traditional healer, and follows both protagonists as they navigate a post-apocalyptic scenario. My novel shares several features with Mda’s including ecological issues such as connection with the land and relationships with non-human subjects. Just as Mda does, my novel weaves together this ecological ethic with traditional belief systems and discrepant attitudes towards them. Through the protagonists’ journeys they learn the importance of engaging meaningfully with others as a way of emerging from crippling isolation and inwardness while recognising identity as a process with no certain resolution. / Dissertation (MA (Creative Writing))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Unit for Creative Writing / MA (Creative Writing) / Unrestricted

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the transformation of the concepts of religion and history between historians of religion Rafael Karsten, Nathan Söderblom, and Geo Widengren. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, as interpreted by Gilles Deleuze, Widengrens critique of the Karsten and Söderblom reveals an epistemological rupture between an evolutionist and a phenomenological discourse of religion. Karsten and Söderblom understand religion as following a linear path of development through fixed stages; Widengren instead study it as a transhistorical phenomenon. In line with historian François Hartog’s concept of regimes of historicity, I locate this epistemological rupture within a larger shift from a futurist to a presentist understanding of history. In futurism history is understood as oriented towards a future goal, while in presentism history is part of a broad present and of constant actuality.

Integrating animism and anthropomorphism into technology and our interactions with said technology allows for the design of better affordances, easier comprehension, and more intricate interactions between humans and technological artefacts. This study seeks to understand the circumstances and contexts under which humans tend to form emotional bonds with nonhuman entities and ascribe life-like or human-like qualities to them, through qualitative research. It also seeks to investigate whether animism and anthropomorphism apply to abstract entities such as a space, through ‘constructive design-based research’ and ‘thing-centered design’ methodologies. The investigations yield several insights in general, that are useful to designers attempting to incorporate animism and anthropomorphism into their work. The prototyping led to the creation of a prototype space that can serve as the foundation for future research. / Integrering av animism och antropomorfism i teknik och vår interaktion med nämnda teknik möjliggör design av bättre överkomliga priser, lättare förståelse och mer invecklade interaktioner mellan människor och tekniska artefakter. Denna studie syftar till att förstå de omständigheter och sammanhang under vilka människor tenderar att bilda känslomässiga band med icke-mänskliga enheter och tillskriva dem livsliknande eller mänskliga egenskaper genom kvalitativ forskning. Det försöker också undersöka om animism och antropomorfism gäller abstrakta enheter som ett utrymme, genom ‘constructive design-based research’ och ‘thing-centered design’ metoder. Undersökningarna ger i allmänhet flera insikter som är användbara för designers som försöker integrera animism och antropomorfism i sitt arbete. Prototyperingen ledde till skapandet av ett prototyputrymme som kan tjäna som grund för framtida forskning.

The starting point of this work is the concept of indigenous animism in Félix Guattari's late work at the end of his life, understood as a form of subjectivity operating through different regimes of signs than the "modern" one. These animist semiotics are "polysemic" and "trans-individual," while instead of building a sharp division between the spheres of "nature" and "culture", they inhabit reality by "collective entities half-thing half-soul, half- man half-animal, machine and flow, matter and sign." The aim of most of the following text is then primarily to trace these semiotics across the joint work of Deleuze and Guattari. After introducing the context of Deleuze's philosophy and its specific "image of thought," and explaining its basic concepts, we will focus on the description and comparison of the semiotic "ethnographies" of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The first volume traces the "universal history" of the ways of hominization (becoming human) of man from the state of nature, through various forms of inscription, which constitute society and culture. These modes are several and do not work only through language. In the limit experience of schizophrenia, the authors of Anti-Oedipa find a moment preceding all these historically contingent forms of hominization. In contrast, the...

Le non-humain et son ontologie sont définis dans ce mémoire en fonction des écrits de Philippe Descola et d’Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, deux figures-clés en anthropologie contemporaine sur l’Amazonie. L’animisme de Descola prête aux non-humains une intériorité humaine et les différencie par leur corps. Le perspectivisme de Viveiros de Castro, quant à lui, suppose que les points de vue différents créent des mondes et établissent ce qui est humain ou non. L’humain correspond au sujet cosmologique à la position pronominale de la première personne du singulier, ou « I », au sein d’une relation. De la sorte, un non-humain se perçoit comme un humain à cette position pronominale « I » et voit l’Autre à la position pronominale « it », position du non-humain. Dans ces deux ontologies, le non-humain est conçu comme une personne capable d’agir dans les mondes. La diversité des êtres inclus dans cette ontologie relationnelle est démontrée par des illustrations provenant de l’ethnographie achuar et araweté de ces deux auteurs. Puis, les relations de parenté, d’alliance et de prédation que les non-humains tissent entre eux et avec les humains exposent l’homologie des rapports non-humains avec les rapports humains. Finalement, l’analyse des méthodes de communication entre le non-humain et l’humain élucide comment la reconnaissance du non-humain dans une communication permet le traitement de ces êtres en tant qu’humains. Le non-humain ne serait donc pas un sujet permanent, mais temporaire le moment de l’interaction. / The non-human and its ontology are defined in this paper based on the writings of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, two key figures in contemporary anthropology concerning the Amazon. Animism, according to Descola, grants a human interiority to non-humans and differentiates them by their bodies. Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, meanwhile, assumes that various points of view create different worlds and establish what is human and what is not. The human corresponds, then, to the cosmological reflexive pronoun "I" in a relationship. Thus, a non-human perceives itself as a human and sees the Other to the impersonal pronoun "it", the position of the non-human. In both ontologies, the non-human is conceived as a person capable of acting in the worlds. The diversity of beings included in this relational ontology is illustrated with the ethnography of these two authors regarding the Achuar and the Araweté. Also, relationships of kinship, alliance and predation weaved among the non-humans and with the humans exhibit a homology based on human relationships. Finally, the analysis of the various methods of communication between non-humans and humans elucidates how the recognition of non-humans in a communication addresses them as humans. The non-human is therefore not a permanent subject, but a temporary one during the interaction.