Multispecies Kinship and Kindness: Knowing Life Through Animist Etiquette and Ethics

New animism research and debate, along with related fields, have challenged the destructive human exceptionalism and separatism of Modernity (in Latourian terms). Moreover, these studies make clear that animism is not a theory that there is life in everything. Rather, rooted in an understanding that every existence moves through, among, and as life, animism is a commitment to the implications and obligations of kinship and pervasive relatedness, what I describe as “etiquettes” of approaching multispecies modes responsively and responsibly. The increasing recognition of the importance of Indigenous knowledges, especially as these serve to enhance the diversity of life and lives, encourages further efforts to improve the skillful mutuality of multispecies relationality, or kind kinship. This chapter engages with selected animist ways of being and socializing in the larger-than-human world. I provide some examples of transformative scholarship, both etiquettes and ethics, that seeks more just and sustainable relations with which to contest the destructive machinery that threatens planetary life.