Nordic Animism - Interview with Rune Hjarnø

linktr.ee/nordicanimism

shop.nordicanimism.com/shop/9-books-and-calend…

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.

S4E21 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we are excited to have Rune Hjarnø with us who is a thinker and podcaster and pagan animist Norse Animist coming to us from Scandinavia. So welcome Ro

Rune: Thank you very much. Super happy to be here.

Mark: Rune was suggested to us by one of our listeners who had been listening Toro's work and said that we could have a very interesting conversation. So we are here to have a very interesting conversation.

Rune: Totally.

Yucca: Yeah. Thank you for coming on. I'm really excited. So.

Rune: thanks for having me. It's gonna be super interesting.

Yucca: Yeah, do you wanna go ahead and start by just, you know, letting our listeners know a little bit about who you are and what your background and interests are?

Rune: Yeah, let me, let me try yeah. My name is Rune I'm a Danish anthropologist of religion. And I, what I'm trying to do on my general platform, which is called Nordic Animism is that I'm trying to use indigenous knowledge scholarship and new animist thinking to look at our own cultural heritage as Euro ascendants because there's this weird assumption in our time that These are ways of thinking about our own culture that are only available if you belong to an indigenous colonized groups.

And that assumption is there seemingly in popular culture and in scholarship and, and in all kinds of ways, in spite of the fact that what a lot of indigenous peoples are actually doing is that they're encouraging us as majority populations to start thinking like this about ourselves. But it's a difficult, for a number of reasons to do with cultural politics.

It's a diff difficult step to take. So a lot of, not a lot of people are doing it. It's spite of the fact that indigenous knowledge is becoming a big thing. Anyway, so yeah. So that's basically what I'm doing. And I also feel that when I'm doing that I'm, I'm being brought through dealing with a lot of these problems of cultural politics because when you.

When you look at, for instance, our culture as euron and people, and also the ways that our traditional culture has been sometimes co-opted then you are necessarily faced with issues such as well, racism, whiteness, the construction of whiteness, the rejection of animism actually as a part of construction of whiteness and these sort of things.

So, and therefore it becomes a very, I think a very intersect intersectional work that is basically becomes a form of, of decolonizing. So yeah, and I'm then trying to do this to sort of bring this into popular spaces because one thing is that, you know, I can sit online and I can go blah, blah, blah in my highbrow, you know, academic language and nobody's gonna understand the stand a bloody thing, but what what actually.

Or to come out of something like this is popular culture stuff that can be communicated to real people. Stuff that that can also attract actually real people. So, I've launched symbolism of totemic kinship with the world around us. I've written a book about the, the turning of the seasons and I've, yeah.

Different, different projects like that. And then I'm continuously communicating on my channel. Yeah. Did that kind of sum it up or did I speak too lo too long?

Yucca: No, that's great. And I have to say, I'm so excited to hear you talking about indigenous European cultures because so often the ideas that, that there isn't. And that that's the, that European is the opposite of indigenous, rather than seeing that there's indigenous all over the world, not just from specific groups.

And I think that that's really valuable that you're bringing this to light.

Rune: Thanks and I, I'll just add one little. Have it at there. And that is that when I'm talking about traditional European culture, I actually don't use the word indigenous. And the reason is that when we talk about indigenous peoples, we mostly talk, or we are generally talking about people who have been exposed to colonialism.

That means that if you are in Wyoming and there's a group of Shoshone living there, you know, then when they can then the word indigenous, that to them, that's also a legal category. That it, it means access to fishing rights and land rights and hunting and access to funding, to first language teaching and all these kind of things that we don't need as majority populations.

So what, so what I'm basically. This is just, I'm, I'm just saying this as, because this is an important little addition that, that is important to not actually when we talk about indigenous knowledge I mean, and I give you at some level you could call it indigenous knowledge, traditional knowledge, and in majority traditional knowledge and indigenous knowledge are basically the same kinds of knowledge, but the word indigenous is just a little bit touchy.

And it's touchy for the indigenous people. So it's important to sort of, move around it a little bit. But like, I, I, I definitely get you a sentiment. We need to be able to speak about our our own heritage in exactly the same, or with those categories that, you know, authors like Robin Kimara and these kind of people are using to understand their culture.

Mark: Yes. Yes. I, I think the, the first thing that strikes me as, as you speak is that we are definitely on the same page from a value standpoint. You know, we're, we're very, very adamant about the need for decolonization and the the importance of indigenous and traditional understandings of the nature of the world of development, of reciprocity in our ecological relationships, all of those kinds of values.

So, I, I think maybe that's a good place to start from. Our work has been in building community around a science rooted. Understanding of the nature of the world, but a transformation of the value system that informs the way society operates. And it sounds like at least the transformation part of it is very similar ru to what you, you are focusing on.

Rune: Totally. And I think I would probably also say the science routing. I'm, I'm not a natural scientist. I'm, I'm, More of a historical religion, anthropologist type. But but I don't perceive and this may be where we differ, I'm not sure, but I don't perceive necessarily a contradiction between, for instance religious languages or animist mythologies, a way of understanding the world and a scientific way of understanding the world.

If you look at how an animist mythology, for instance, is typically structured, then you'd find that there are, it's. It's not one package, it's not one worldview that some people kind of buy into. And then to kind of adopt that whole thing as if they're in installing a new operative system on a computer.

It's more like a, a, a jumbled up toolbox with a lot of kind of stuff lying in it. And, and then you can use it in different ways and it's kind of combined in different ways for different purposes. And some of these different tools can be contradictory and they can be radically contradict, contradictory.

So the same, for instance, animist way of talking about, say, deities can be contradictory from one ritual situation to the next. And this also count, this counts on many levels in religious practices. So if you have a scien, a scientific perception of the world, then in a sense that's also just one toolbox.

So if you move out of the, the, the monolithic. Ways of understanding the world that have characterized Abrahamic traditions particularly Christianity where, you know, there's ki there's kind of one worldview and you have to buy into that if, if you, when, when, and I think that would be a pagan step to move out of that.

And then science just is just this incredibly beautiful, powerful, deep knowledge …