I am an Eco-Pagan insider who became aware of the existence of a “somatic, physical knowing” through my personal practice (Harris 1996: 151). Questions about this powerful but peculiar phenomenon led me to undertake academic fieldwork among UK Eco-Pagans living at protest camps and in more conventional urban settings (Harris 2008, 2011). I found that many Eco-Pagans explain their intimate relationships with the organic environment in terms of the genius loci – the spirits of place – and I developed an embodied situated epistemology to understand this process.

As Graham Harvey explains, contemporary animists are concerned with “particular ways of being related to the world” that challenge “discourses that divide spirit and flesh, soul and body, subject and object … people and environment, and so on” (G. Harvey 2005b: 83). I offer a model of embodied situated cognition that illustrates how this way of being might operate. It both deepens our understanding of this radically non-dual way of being and affirms that it is more fundamental to human experience than conventional Western dualist consciousness. This chapter thus makes a significant contribution towards the ongoing discussion of relational epistemologies and ontologies (inter alia Bird-David 1999) and the “new animism” (G. Harvey 2005b: 83).

I propose that embodied situated cognition depends on an affective, sensual mode of being-in-the-world that reveals a fundamental integration between what we conventionally understand as “self” and “world”.