Anthropologists refer to this way of being as animism. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defines animism quite simply as the claim ‘that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’.5 Animists approach animals and plants and even rivers and mountains as subjects in their own right, rather than as objects. There is no ‘it’ in such a world view. Everything is ‘thou’.
