Unlearning through spirituality: Mongolian and Western animistic traditions as pathways to enhance sustainability

This paper explores how animistic rituals—specifically the ovoo offering in Inner Mongolia—can serve as embodied engagements with what Roy Bhaskar (1975) calls the “real”: a deeper layer of reality shaped by unseen causal and spiritual forces. By acknowledging the 'inhabitants' of this deeper layer, we contribute to the broader post-humanist, or more-than-human, turn in the social sciences and humanities. Using a sensory collaborative autoethnographic approach, we take the ovoo encounter as a point of departure to examine our own onto-epistemic assumptions and to build a conceptual bridge for Western-trained audiences to loosen the grip of empirical-positivist habits of thought. We show how these practices enact a relational ontology that disrupts capitalist modernity’s extractivist, anthropocentric, and dualistic assumptions. We argue that, for those embedded in Western knowledge systems, openness to such place-based spiritual practices can foster the unlearning of dominant colonial-capitalist ways of being. The paper’s contribution is twofold: first, it demonstrates how engaging with the ovoo offering nurtures reciprocal, embodied connections that unsettle anthropocentric and dualistic worldviews; and second, it highlights how animistic traditions can counter the mechanistic cosmologies underlying extractivism. Such encounters can help reawaken suppressed spiritual lineages within Western thought, expanding the ethical and affective horizons of sustainability. At the same time, we remain attentive to the risks of co-optation through commodification, tourism, or detached New Age reinterpretations. We conclude by situating these reflections within wider debates on sustainability, ecological justice, and relational ethics. • The de-animation of nonhuman nature under capitalism led to alienation and ecological harm. • Animistic practices like Inner Mongolian Ovoo offerings express relational ontologies linking humans, land, spirits, and life. • Taking spiritual and animistic practices as an objective reality can help unlearn colonial-capitalist ways of being. • Science can be reimagined as an embodied experience where the material and spiritual converge. • Revitalizing Western animistic traditions opens paths for unlearning colonial-capitalist paradigms.