Are Stones Living?

The article addresses a very new theme in anthropology, focusing on intra-actions among humans and the mineral world. Within an anthropology of the environment, in the context of the Italian Piave river (North Italy), where water and stones were described by old gatherers as living beings, this ethnography discerns a form of animism that attributed subjectivity, intentionality, ability and agency to non-humans (water and stones), revealing an interspecies network of relationships hidden by the western naturalistic worldview. These data contribute to a reflection on Descolian ontological animism, recomposing the discrepancies of perspectives vised as contrasting, as the Ingoldian perception of the living being, De Castro’s perspectivism, and Barad’s new materialism, towards an anthropology of life.