“The truth about stories”, writes Cherokee-Greek novelist Thomas King, “is that that's all we are” (T. King 2003: 2). Our world suffers now from the ecological devastations of a warming planet, extinctions of species and degraded soils and waters, and from profound inequalities of race, gender and class within societies and enormous gaps between wealthy and poor countries. If stories are what we are, then the stories we have been telling ourselves must be profoundly broken. The fundamental tale we tell ourselves will need to change.

The origin story of modern Western culture is a tale with roots in both Genesis and Plato that reached its present form in the seventeenth through twentieth centuries in northwest Europe. It is a story rarely told as a single unified tale, which tends both to conceal its existence and to render its authority irrefutable. The story developed across several domains of Western knowledge and weaves them into a conceptual whole, which is why my discussion ranges from theology to anthropology, from economics to philosophy, and from evolutionary theory to sociology.

Providing a contrast to the Western story are the cosmologies of animist cultures, a few of which I highlight here in order to spell out some social and political implications of cosmologies that are relational at their core. My goal is to learn from these animist stories, a process that is fundamentally different from appropriation.