Michael Walling is Director of the biennial ORIGINS Festival, which brings Indigenous artists and activists to the UK. Since its inaugural edition in 2009, the Festival has had a strong relationship with Graham Harvey, particularly in relation to the use of ceremony. Michael Walling takes three key moments of interaction with Graham Harvey as starting points for a wider discussion of ceremony as practised within the Festival, looking at its meaning and function in the context of a contemporary event in the UK, and engaging with questions of post-colonial justice, the distinction between spectacle and participation, and the tension between appropriate learning and cultural appropriation. The three key narratives look at the first ORIGINS opening ceremony, examining the idea of welcome; an intercultural encounter at the Sami Festival Riddu Riđđu, leading to a discussion of storytelling and narrative within ceremonial structures; and the Return to Earth ceremony for Totem Latamat in 2021, an event that responded to the Climate Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting the potential for politicised ceremony.

This chapter explores indigenous tourism in British Columbia, Canada, which in part has been set in train by indigenous communities themselves in order to establish sites and occasions for education and dialogue. Jennings explores her transition from tourist to guest researcher and constitutes a careful meditation on the ethics of pursuing research with indigenous communities through the lens of guesthood. James L. Cox (University of Edinburgh) takes the idea of guesthood further in his “‘Guesthood’ as a Scientific Method: Principles Supporting Relational Research”. Drawing on the physicist Carlo Rovelli, Graham’s 2003 Numen article and others, Cox presents an approach he calls “relational research” which combines guesthood, phenomenology and action research.

In an important article appearing in the journal Numen in 2003, Graham Harvey argued that research among living communities requires that those conducting the investigations assume that they are guests of the subjects of their academic studies. In other words, scholars must acknowledge that their research can proceed only by the consent of the communities being studied. In this sense, consent equates to an invitation. Harvey called this research method ‘guesthood’. In this chapter, Harvey’s description of research is expanded into an analysis of ‘relational research’, which has grown out of scientific principles advocated by the leading physicist Carlo Rovelli, who contends that everything in the universe is relational. Rovelli has demonstrated in laboratory studies how so-called physical processes differ according to context and are relative to the position of the observer. By extension, when applied to the study of human subjects, the interaction between the researcher and those being researched is determinative in producing scientific conclusions. Relationality as a key concept in research methodologies not only acknowledges local agency as critical in designing research projects, but, following Rovelli, this chapter contends that principles derived from relational research are requisite for a study to be regarded as genuinely scientific.

This article briefly explores the European hare’s folkloric associations with impulsive behaviour, incandescence, and osseous growth. A playful romp through the physical and behavioural qualities attributed to hares sees these creatures as embodying a particular “life in the head”, a generative potency closely linked with semen, marrow and the brain, and giving rise to animate form. Animal symbolism is thus shown to lift our closest other-than-humans out of generic otherness by providing them not so much with individual personhood as with distinctive personalities as representatives of peculiar kinds of being. Such an emblematic recognition of animals, it is argued, can inspire a measure of what Graham Harvey, in a recent attempt to identify “religion” with immediate everyday concerns, has called an etiquette of interspecies relationality” (2013: 215) in which recognition of alterity and likeness go hand in hand.

In a contribution to Spirit Possession and Trance (2010), Graham Harvey proposed to re-use the abbreviation ASC for the phrase Adjusted Styles of Communication. While the definition of ASC remained unchanged and is still used for Altered States of Consciousness, Harvey’s proposal points to an important critique against the common approach to spirit possession and trance. Following his lead this chapter will propose a new approach to (spirit) possession that rejects pre-existing Western notions of spirits and highlights relationality as key to our understanding, i.e., the relation between persons of different species, humans and otherwise.

This chapter will explore the history and current role of plants in ritual, and as people ,in the Caribbean and related areas (including Africa). Work has been done on plant use in indigenous ritual and through the lens of plants as persons, in a number of colonialized countries, notably Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and North America, but the Caribbean remains a somewhat marginalized area of study particularly in the area of Religious Studies. By drawing on archival material combined with scholarly work on ethnobotany, this chapter aims to explore the relationships between Indigenous and enslaved African peoples in the region, and ritual plant use, both in colonial times and into the present day. With a focus on the island of St Vincent and the Botanical Garden there, the first in the Western hemisphere established in 1775, it will think through the use of abortifacients to enable enslaved pregnant females to send their foetuses home to Africa before being birthed into slavery, the act of geophagy or pica (dirt eating) that, drawing on African traditions, would enable enslaved people to die at their own hand, and again allow their souls to return to their homeland. In regard to Indigenous peoples, the use of Bixa Orellana, known as achiote, was employed as a protectant by the people now known as Kalinago, then Island Caribs. Today, plants are used by Jamaican Rastafarians to connect with Jah, in Cuban Santeria healing rituals, as protective charms in the Guianas, and to release the souls of the dead in Haitian vudu.

This chapter draws on fieldwork with an Indigenous-led land restoration project in northern California in order to explore how emerging land restoration practices are decolonizing the landscape by ritualizing relationships with fire and plants. Fire is given agency and animacy and plants are treated like relatives in these restoration projects. In an area of California that was devastated by the combined genocide and ecocide in the wake of European settlers, especially during the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century, catastrophic wildfires have led to the need for more fire on the land and the revival of Indigenous relationships with fire that were suppressed two hundred years ago. Decolonization involves the active rekindling of older ways of relating to landscapes among Native American tribes in this region. These ways treat fire and plants as persons to whom humans have responsibilities and these responsibilities are ritually expressed and constituted during restoration work.

In recent decades scholars from diverse disciplines in the Arts and Sciences have been advancing animistic spiritualities, kinship feelings toward non-human organisms, and eco-organicist/Gaian worldviews, in order to promote proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors. Providing evidence from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, analyzing displays, images, motion pictures, and texts at such venues, I argue that curators at many of the world’s museums, have become influential promoters of entirely naturalistic forms of animistic perception. By so doing they provide paths to spirituality, meaning, and purpose that are especially relevant for those who have left behind the world’s predominant religions. These venues seek to evoke emotions and perceptions that echo longstanding religious and mystical perceptions while enriching and reinforcing them with scientific understandings. Whether the venue is art-focused or science-focused, curators fuse the arts and sciences as they appeal to the aesthetic and scientific sensibilities of visitors. For many of whose who have deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature, these spaces function as shrines and pilgrimage sites. Such individuals include, perhaps especially, those who do not consider themselves to be religious but who nevertheless, recognize non-human organisms as kin, worthy of respect and reverence. The global convergence and proliferation of exhibitions expressing and promoting Gaian and Animistic naturalism illuminate how such nature spiritualties are effectively competing for the spiritual hearts and minds of millions of people around the world.

Academic attention to Indigenous religions has grown steadily since the 1990’s in parallel with increasing attention to the material dimension of religions. In fact, the influential scholarship of Graham Harvey with his emphasis new animism research, lived religion, and material religions have generated new life and new directions for research for the academic Study of Religions. In the spirit of salutation, this chapter highlights the influence and impact of Harvey’s work by operationalising (or, putting to use), his new animism/personhood research by engaging with selected Indigenous religious practices and perspectives in ways that emphasize their usefulness. Harvey’s research, along with that of scholars such as Nurit Bird-David have not only inspired new theoretical and methodological directions for researchers and students, particularly those from non-indigenous traditions, to re-think and structurally re-organise how we understand, approach, and address different (religious) worlds (including ‘Western’ ones). The chapter, therefore, engages with Harvey’s new animism research to advance methodological approaches about indigenous religions, rituals and religious material cultures more broadly, offering a Harvey-inspired material, methodological approach to ‘things’ as tangible/visible mediums on different ontological perspectives/religious worlds.