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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Weird Studies/You Must Change Your Life
  • Micro- and macro-religiosity. animism
from capitalism
  • The word “magic” refers to a broad range of beliefs that include animism, charm(s), divination, enchantment, fantasy, fetish, glamour, illusion, miracles, the occult, shamanism, sorcery, spells, the supernatural, superstition,trickery, and witchcraft. In this respect, it is “society casting spells on itself” (Taussig 1980: 136)...anthropologists, as well as the occasional scholar from other disciplines, have suggested that magical practices are alive and well in contemporary industrialized societies, where finance and trade, government gatherings, the law (including intellectual property and trademark law), medicine and health, technology, advertising, marketing, cultural production, and consumption all, at one time or another, operate according to magical premises.
from Erik Davis
  • a suit against Southern Pacific brought by the California county of Santa Clara was argued before the Supreme Court. The case became the occasion for a legal imbroglio that resulted in the stunning and epochal doctrine of “corporate personhood”: the notion that “artificial persons” like corporations should, like flesh and blood citizens, be covered by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Like Victor Frankenstein with his monster, the court had brought animism and agency to something that no-one had ever considered alive before. A new kind of entity was conjured onto the world stage: the corporate person, an egregore of enterprise, a golem of capital, technology, and law.
from In the Eye of the Wild
  • book by Nastassja Martin, an anthropologist with animism leanings, about her encounter with a bear in a remote region of Kamchatka. She was severely injured but survived, and the books ia her account of trying to make sense of her experience. (rec from WS)
from Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown
  • Mimesis, dark surrealism, virality, animacy – he links all these, he's trying to get at something happening in the world, some aspect of contemporary experience.
from Notes on Daybreak
from Chaos Magick
from Weird Studies/SSOTBME
  • Let's see if I can give the general take: the author (Ramsey Dukes aka Lionel Snell) has a theory that divides human culture into four quadrants: Art, Science, Religion, Magic. Of roughly equal stature and importance. There's various dimensions these can be related to, like thought vs feeling. Magic is the interesting one of course, the others we kind of know how they work (although there is quite a lot of talk about the purpose of art and the nature of science on this show). Magic is hard to define, it resists the grasp of rational thought (aka science). It can involve a degree of animism, of assigning personality and agency to various natural objects, by a sort of as-if process. This is a holistic mode of cognition in contrast to the normie mechanical, reductionist one.
from Pantheologies
  • The problem it seems is that pantheism not only unsettles and not only entangles, but demolishes the raced and gendered ontic distinctions that Western metaphysics (with some critical exceptions) insists on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, and animacy and inanimacy – distinctions that are rooted theologically in the Greco, Roman and Abrahamic distinction between creator and created, or God and world. Insofar as pantheism rejects this fundamental distinction, it threatens all the other privileges at map onto it: male versus female, light versus darkness, good versus evil, and humans over every other organism.
from Nihil Unbound
  • More importantly, mimetic sacrifice establishes the fundamental distinction whose rationality Adorno and Horkheimer believe enlightenment is in the process of eliding: the distinction between animate and inanimate: ‘mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive peoples. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places arises from this pre-animism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 11).
    • Sound relevant if cryptic
from Philippe Descola
  • For example, if you hunt, especially if you derive your main subsistence from hunting, it is not a bad bet to surmise that the prey you are pursuing has an interiority of its own — whether you call it cunning, a soul or a theory of mind — and that you should look at yourself as if you were that prey so as to organize your moves accordingly (i.e. deceiving the animal by not doing what it would expect you to do from the position where it may become aware of your presence). Systematized in discursive form, in myth and ritual statements, this perfectly normal inference about the dispositions of an animal, and the equally normal process of empathy with a higher form of animal life, constitutes the experiential basis of what I have called animism, i.e. the assumption that, under certain circumstances, non-humans of various kinds behave as if they had an intentionality analogous to the one humans believe they are endowed with (Descola 2005a, chapter 6).
from metaphor
  • Something I wrote about in my dissertation, as something of a preliminary to animacy and agency. I was heavily influenced by Lakoff and Johnson's well-known metaphor theory, which blew my mind in such a way that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have a constant reminder in my head that our most abstract concepts are built out of useful culturally evolved mappings to and from the physical embodied world.
from Pantheologies
  • The ongoing effort to "reframe and reclaim" the tranditionally insulting and ironically indistinct category of animism — an effort oft encoded as "new animism" — can be traced back to Irving Hallowell's renowned study of the Ojibwa nation of the Great Lakes and Central Canada...the "worldview" of the Ojibwa breaks open and relativizes the central category of anthro-pology because its structuring concept of personhood...is not confined to humanity. A person for the Ojibwa is a being who can act, speak, move, and change–and as such, the sun is not a thing or an object, but rather a person "of the other-than-human class" (p92)

animism

30 Oct 2021 - 03 Jul 2025
Open in Logseq
    • The belief or stance that various things not normally thought of as agent-like are alive in some sense, perhaps contain an animating spirit. Animism used to be the human default; and while modernism and science have done their best to eliminate it, it just won't go away that easily.
    • I was out hunting together with two Yukaghirs, an elderly and a younger hunter, and they had succeeded in killing a brown bear. While the elderly hunter was poking out its eyes with his knife and croaking like a raven as custom prescribes, the younger one, who was standing a few meters away, shouted to the bear: “Grandfather, don’t be fooled, it is a man, Vasili Afanasivich, who killed you and is now blinding you!” At first the elderly hunter doing the butchering stood stock-still as if he were in shock, but then he looked at his younger partner and they both began laughing ecstatically as if the whole ritual were a big joke. Then the elderly hunter said to the younger one, “Stop fooling around and go make a platform for the grandfather’s bones.” However, he sounded by no means disturbed. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was still laughing while giving the order. The only really disturbed person was me, who saw the episode as posing a serious threat to my entire research agenda, which was to take animism seriously. The hunter’s joke suggested that underlying the Yukaghir animistic cosmology was a force of laughter, of ironic distance, of making fun of the spirits. How could I take the spirits seriously as an anthropologist when the Yukaghirs themselves did not?

    • Earlier writings

      • My dissertation had a chapter on animacy and its application to computing (see Agency at the Media Lab) The work was based on a set of animist-related ideas:
        • that animism is built into our everyday cognitive models via metaphor;
        • that these metaphors are implicitly built into the ideas, languages and tools we use to build computational systems;
        • that we ought to understand this better and start to use animist ideas explicitly.

    • Random refs

      • Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
        • Drained of its animism, with the laws of inertia and gravity substituted for the psychic life of nature as the principle of movement, understood objectively instead of subjectively, Bruno's universe would turn into something like the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, marvellously moving forever under its own laws placed in it by a God who is not a magician but a mechanic and a mathematician. (p451)
        • Moreover, the mechanistic world view established by the seventeenth-century revolution has been in its turn superseded by the amazing latest developments of scientific knowledge. It may be illuminating to view the scientific revolution as in two phases, the first phase consisting of an animistic universe operated by magic, the second phase of a mathematical universe operated by mechanics. An enquiry into both phases, and their interactions, may be a more fruitful line of historical approach to the problems raised by the science of today than the fine which concentrates only on the seventeenth-century triumph. Is not all science a gnosis, an insight into the nature of the All, which proceeds by successive revelations ? (p452)
        • Hence, may it not be supposed, when mechanics and mathematics took over from animism and magic, it was this internalisation, this intimate connection of the mens with the world, which had to be avoided at all costs. And hence, it may be suggested, through the necessity for this strong reaction, the mistake arose of allowing the problem of mind to fall so completely out of step and so far behind the problem of matter in the external world and how it works. Thus, from the point of view of the history of the problem of mind and of why it has become such a problem through the neglect of it at the beginning of the modern period, "Hermes Trismegistus" and his history is important. (p455)

    • Let's ask an LLM

      • Animism, the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence, has been studied and discussed by numerous scholars across various disciplines. Here are some of the most important thinkers on the topic of animism:
      • 1. **Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917)**: A pioneering British anthropologist, Tylor is often credited with introducing the concept of animism in his work "Primitive Culture" (1871). He defined animism as the belief in spiritual beings and considered it the earliest form of religion.
      • 2. **Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)**: A French sociologist, Durkheim explored animism in his seminal work "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1912). He viewed animism as a fundamental aspect of totemism and primitive religion.
      • 3. Marilyn Strathern: A contemporary anthropologist, Strathern has contributed significantly to the understanding of Melanesian societies, where animistic beliefs are prevalent. Her work often explores how animism interrelates with concepts of personhood and social relations.
      • 4. Tim Ingold: A British anthropologist, Ingold has written extensively on animism, particularly in his book "The Perception of the Environment" (2000). He argues for a relational understanding of animism, where humans and non-humans are interconnected in a web of life.
      • 5. Graham Harvey: Harvey is known for his work on contemporary animism and neo-paganism. His book "Animism: Respecting the Living World" (2005) offers a modern perspective on animistic beliefs and practices, emphasizing the ethical and respectful relationship with the environment.
      • 6. Viveiros de Castro: A Brazilian anthropologist, Viveiros de Castro is noted for his work on Amerindian perspectivism, a form of animism that emphasizes the perspectival nature of beings in Amazonian cultures. His book "Cannibal Metaphysics" (2014) delves into these ideas.
      • 7. Philippe Descola: A French anthropologist, Descola's work on the Achuar people of the Amazon has significantly contributed to the understanding of animism. His book "Beyond Nature and Culture" (2005) challenges the nature-culture dichotomy and explores different ontologies, including animism.
      • These scholars have provided diverse perspectives on animism, ranging from its historical roots to its contemporary manifestations and philosophical implications.