Video: Shoko Yoneyama on 'Miyazaki Hayao's Animism and the Anthropocene'
Shoko Yoneyama introduces her Theory, Culture & Society article ‘Miyazaki Hayao's Animism and the Anthropocene’ (Open Access).
Abstract
The need for a reconsideration of human-nature relationships has been widely recognized in the Anthropocene. It is difficult to rethink, however, because there is a crisis of imagination that is deeply entrenched within the fundamental premises of modernity. This article explores how ‘critical animism’ developed by Miyazaki Hayao of Studio Ghibli can address this paucity of imagination by providing alternative ways of knowing and being. ‘Critical animism’ emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with informal cultural heritage in Japan. It is a philosophy that perceives nature as a non-dualistic combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world, while also emphasizing the significance of place. Miyazaki’s critical animism challenges anthropocentrism, secularism, Eurocentrism, as well as dualism. It may be the ‘perfect story’ that could disrupt the existing paradigm, offering a promise to rethink human-nonhuman relationships and envisaging a new paradigm for the social sciences.
Further Reading
Yoneyama, Shoko (2012) Life-world: Beyond Fukushima and Minamata. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10 (42).
Yoneyama, Shoko (2020) Rethinking human-nature telationships in the time of coronavirus: Postmodern animism in films by Miyazaki Hayao & Shinkai Makoto. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18 (16).
Yoneyama, Shoko (2019) Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan, Oxon: Routledge.
Bulbeck, Chilla (2019) Postmodern Animism for a new modernity: How to reconcile with a post-industrial world and its self-imposed disasters (book review). Green Magazine, 5 July 2019.
Yoneyama, Shoko (2017) Animism: A grassroots response to socioenvironmental crisis in Japan. In: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa and Soh, Eun Jeong (eds) New Worlds from Below: Informal Life Politics and Grassroots Action in Twenty-First-Century Northeast Asia. Canberra: ANU Press.
