Animistic ways of seeing—treating landscapes, animals, and even objects as bearers of spirit and agency—have quietly reshaped much contemporary art. Environmental and land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy create works that do not simply use nature as raw material but enter into a kind of dialogue with wind, water, stone, and time, as if these forces were collaborators rather than tools. Indigenous and eco-art movements likewise draw on ancestral animistic worldviews, presenting land, animals, and ancestors as living presences that can be honored, offended, or addressed. In such work, natural materials and sites are not neutral backdrops; they are participants whose “voices” and vulnerabilities shape the artistic process.

In literature, animistic sensibilities appear wherever forests, rivers, and animals are granted interiority and memory. Magical realism and related forms normalize talking rivers, sentient forests, and objects with their own consciousness, echoing cosmologies in which the visible and invisible worlds interpenetrate. Indigenous and postcolonial authors often let land and animal beings act as narrative agents, so that stories themselves feel alive and relational rather than merely descriptive. Climate fiction and nature writing that portray ecosystems as responsive and communicative likewise draw on this sense that the more-than-human world is not an inert stage but a community of subjects.

Film, animation, and television have made these intuitions widely accessible by giving vivid form to spirits of place and element. Works steeped in animistic traditions, such as those that depict forests, rivers, and household spaces as inhabited by spirits, invite viewers to imagine that every corner of the world might be populated by unseen companions. Other cinematic narratives present planetary consciousness or interconnected networks of life that remember, feel, and respond, effectively granting personhood to landscapes and species. Horror genres that center haunted objects or cursed places also rely on the idea that matter can carry intention, memory, or resentment, a distinctly animistic motif.

Popular culture more broadly reflects these currents in games, music, and spiritual lifestyles. Many video games and role‑playing settings populate their worlds with guardian beasts, elemental deities, and living landscapes that must be respected or appeased, turning play into a rehearsal of reciprocal relations with nonhuman powers. Certain musical and performance traditions stage concerts as quasi‑rituals, invoking forest spirits, animal totems, or ancestral presences. Neo‑pagan, New Age, and other earth‑based practices popularize notions of spirit animals, plant spirits, crystals with energy, and sacred sites, while wellness and design trends that treat homes, gardens, and even cities as living organisms echo an animistic ethic of relationship and care.

These artistic and cultural expressions are intertwined with emerging ethical and philosophical currents. Environmental activism and legal movements that speak of the “rights” or “personhood” of rivers, mountains, and ecosystems resonate strongly with animistic understandings of a world filled with other‑than‑human persons. Academic and artistic discourses that emphasize “more‑than‑human worlds” and the vibrancy of matter translate this sensibility into theoretical language, but the underlying intuition is ancient: that humans live within a vast community of beings, visible and invisible, whose presence calls for reverence, reciprocity, and attentive listening.