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The article reads The Stone Virgins as a text underlined by an Indigenous poetics that situates the land as a speaking subject and an archive of memory. Its critical foci are African feminist conceptions of the entanglement of human and nonhuman matter and their implications for current conceptions of the archive. The article suggests that, rather than incorporating into the postcolonial national archive the excluded voices of women and ethnic minorities, The Stone Virgins makes legible minority practices of memory making that the archive does not recognize. To account for these practices and their literary representation, the article draws a comparison between the novel's poetics of land and Indigenous poetics across other Anglophone spheres. The comparison is based in the convergence of Black and Indigenous conceptions of the coconstitutionality of the human and nonhuman. The comparison provides a new critical model for reading postcolonial aesthetic formations that engage nonhuman beings. It furthermore speaks to larger conversations regarding the "ontological turn" of criticism oriented to animist and new materialisms, as it addresses a mode of reading the land in African writing attuned to Indigenous systems of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the term nonhuman near-omniscience to examine the narrative dynamics behind narrators who know almost everything and whose super-human knowledge draws on African cosmologies. Noting the prevalence of such narration in African sf, the article takes Nnedi Okorafor's novel Lagoon (2014) as an example of nonhuman near-omniscience, focusing on the role of the storytelling spider Udide Okwanka as the novel's metanarrator. It traces Udide's use of uncertainty, paradox, and metafictional slippages, while also noting parallels between Udide's trickster qualities and technology in the novel--both human-made and alien--that likewise generate super-human registers of knowledge. As a rejection of the binaries of cosmology/technology, human/nonhuman, and realist/nonrealist, the article considers nonhuman near-omniscience as a practice of relationality, based on Harry Garuba's framework of "animist materialism" and scholarship on animism as a relational epistemology from divergent Indigenous contexts. The paper makes two overarching claims: one, that nonhuman near-omniscience draws on the conception of deities in animist traditions that are typically characterized by relationality, rather than the absolute power commonly associated with the omniscient narrator in Abrahamic traditions; and two, that nonhuman near-omniscience is a metafictional practice that is pertinent not only to our understanding of contemporary African literary genres, but to larger questions of knowledge production in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Greek religion has been very rarely studied with reference to pantheism. This article proposes that we should introduce pantheism as an additional interpretive strategy to understand Greek religion. This presupposes addressing the relationship between the interpretations of doxa (theology), discussion about the nature of divine unity in antiquity (philosophy), and religious cult praxis. The main conceptual arguments underlined in refutations of pantheism are discussed. This is followed by a brief survey of the more frequently discussed monotheism and henotheism in Greek religion. The main part of the article presents pantheistic trends in Greek religion, including philosophical argumentation, pantheistic expressions in mythology and in cultic life. It is found that Greek religion exhibits views that can be regarded as pantheistic: gods were immanent rather than transcendent, everything could potentially participate in divine reality, and the boundaries between divine, human, and nature were not exclusive but permeable and fluid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Mekong, where hydropower and hybrid species have altered the river’s ecology, new sources of potential arise. As the yearly rise and fall of the river is punctuated by sporadic floods and ebbs depending on hydropower generation needs, fish and other species find their spawning and feeding cycles dramatically altered. In turn, they are replaced with new, hybrid species. In the social and religious realms, this material change gives rise to new spirits, and new networks of human and nonhuman forces. While many from the region turn to cash crops or migrant labor, others seek to make new connections by fishing this changed landscape. Through making kin with the new, monstrous river and its new denizens, through tying a new social net as old fishing nets fail, fishermen on the river reach toward new ways of belonging in altered social, ecological, and ontological worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ball-Jointed Doll (BJD) is a category of dolls that are exclusively collected by adult doll collectors. These fully articulated and customizable dolls possess a distinctively significant place in the collector's life. The collectors form an affective relationship with their dolls often animating them. This paper looks at this instance of contemporary animism from a neo-animistic paradigm attempting to dissect the subject–object binary and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is intuitive to think that divine transcendence is incompatible with the sacredness of nature, especially when transcendence is combined with the idea that God alone is valuable. Divine transcendence seems to demote this‐worldly values in favor of union with God in a disembodied afterlife. Divine transcendence also seems to legitimize hierarchies, including male–female and human‐nature hierarchies. Divine immanence seems a better alternative. This set of intuitions about transcendence appears regularly in the field of Religion and Ecology, sometimes as an implicit backdrop rather than an explicit position. This backdrop needs to be thematized and evaluated. For those with ecological concerns, divine transcendence and divine immanence need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, divine transcendence (understood non‐contrastively) complements divine immanence and is compatible with both animist and polytheist cosmologies. The extent of this mutual compatibility and its importance for environmental concerns has yet to be fully articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a reading of Ben Okri's novel The Last Gift of the Master Artists (2022) through the prism of an animist unconscious lens drawing, in particular, from Harry Garuba's theory of Animist Materialism with its correlative Animist Unconscious. It seeks to show that the animist unconscious may lead to a reenchantment in an age of disenchantment and to a conjoining of African traditional and Western myth. The discussion begins with a brief reference to the historical-mythological figure of Sango, god of lightning in Nigeria, birthplace of Okri and Garuba, by way of explaining the paradox inherent in the cosmological axiom "fire that burns and heals" and to suggest that Sango's "non-death suicide" and deification signifies a new principle that can unite permanence and change in a reflection of the melding of history (the catastrophe of slavery) and the narrative of resilience and love in the novel. This is followed, first, by pointing to the link between the Sango symbolism and Africa's historical and cultural heritage and, secondly, by outlining Garuba's Animist Poetics. The core of the essay focuses on the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the magical in the reading of the novel, where the magical signifies an expansion of consciousness. The presentation argues that Okri writes against the rift of magical realism, a phrase all too often used in critiques of the symbolic mode and alchemical writings of this Nigerian-born Londoner, concluding that the deployment of an animist unconscious lens serves to re-imbue the natural world with its lifeforce, spiritualizing the phenomenal world of Nature and its objects, a strategy that reedifies the reading, accentuating the artistic creativity that immortalizes the mythical tribe of itinerant Master Artists. And, as Alberto Manguel presciently observes in A History of Reading : "We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function" (7). But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?—Denis Diderot (1796) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political theory has long depended upon a clear boundary between life and non-life. Even work which emphasizes non-human beings (e.g., in animal rights, posthumanism or "new materialism") continues to reinforce the divide between the organic and the inorganic. This article undermines that division, highlighting marginal cases of life. The organicity of certain rocks and biochar, the growth of crystals, the machinic qualities of viruses: all point to an instability in the excluded middle between life and non-life. The article suggests alternative philosophical traditions to which political theory could turn—namely, panpsychism, hylozoism, and traditional animism—as conceptual and theoretical resources to examine these interstices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical movement known as New Materialism, which emerged in the early 2000s, saw not only the return of ontology, but also the affirmation of a materialism in which all oppositions and contradictions would dissolve. New Materialist trends take the agency of non-humans, as suggested by Haraway and Latour in particular, a step further, and come to regard all the material components of our societies as active agents endowed, to varying degrees, with a form of vitality. In this essay I return to what I call the “ontologism” of New Materialism in relation to vital, mechanistic and dialectical forms of materialism, commenting on authors such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz.

The contemporary ‘plant turn’, driven by modern scientific researches into plant potentialities and a renewed philosophical appreciation of botanical lives within Critical Plant Studies, has spurred discussions about the attribution of personhood to plants. However, anxieties subtend the notion of plant personhood, for it being predominantly anchored in an anthropocentric paradigm of autonomous and embodied ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ properties of plant ontology. Drawing from Indigenous Naga animist vegetal ethos and building upon the arguments of Matthew Hall and Michael Marder, the article attempts to transcend this impasse by conceptualising a neological framework of co-constitutive and reciprocal syntropic capacities as the defining elements of a non-anthropocentric vegetal personhood. Subsequently, the study employs this syntropic model of plant personhood to analyse the ethno-literary representations of vegetal agency and communication as syntropic plant capacities within the context of Indigenous Naga animist culture in two short stories from Temsula Ao’s anthology The Tombstone in My Garden (2022). On the whole, the article explores how the syntropic capacities of plants can function as a connective complement between the Western discourses of Critical Plant Studies and the Indigenous Naga animist arboreal worldviews to facilitate re-membering of an ecocentric plant personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay approaches the "God is dead" theme by offering a new philosophical history addressing what would make belief in divinity, in God, sustainable and unsustainable. I claim that the death of nature and the death of God in the modern era are manifestations of a progressive distancing from a religious philosophy of the Earth that guided human development until the beginnings of civilization. I outline within the space limitations here a new way of looking at the rise of civilization and the modern era by re-evaluating large-scale epochal beliefs and assumptions of progress within a context of sustainable ends and what I have termed sustainable wisdom. From an original evolved outlook I call animate mind, rooted in a religious philosophy of the living Earth, succeeding contractions of anthropocentric mind and machine-centric mind have regressively disconnected from the community of life. This trajectory courses the disconnect from the livingness of things as defining cosmos, to that of machine-centric mind in the modern era, a devolutionary elevation of the feelingless machine, of deadness, of what Erich Fromm described as cultural necrophilia. I propose rebalancing these later contractions of anthropocentric and machine-centric mind with that deeper reality of animate mind, forged as the human evolutionary legacy still present in the human body-mind today. The renewed legacy of animate mind provides a key to what a sustainable God might mean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are tens of thousands of painted rock art motifs in the Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon, including humans, animals, therianthropes, geometrics, and flora. For most of the last 100 years, inaccessibility and political unrest has limited research activities in the region. In this paper, we discuss findings from six years of field research and consider the role of rock art as a manifestation of Indigenous ontologies. By employing intertwining strands of evidence—a range of ethnographic sources, local Indigenous testimonies from 2021–2023, and the motifs themselves—we argue that the rock art here is connected to ritual specialists negotiating spiritual realms, somatic transformation, and the interdigitation of human and non-human worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using resources provided by the Bible, tradition, experience, and reason, a close look at magazine articles from the 2023 summer considers the reality of global warming. Scientists exploring a lake's strata, Canadian wildfires, phosphorous runoff, algal blooms, and Phoenix's string of high temperatures suggest we have entered the Anthropocene Era. The idea of domination borrowed from the first chapter of Genesis coupled with Aristotle's Great Chain of Being are used to encourage practices leading to global warming. Theological anomalies from this history raise questions about our continuing use of the triumphal metaphor of God as King of kings. A new ecological awareness and the metaphor of God's Body as the World re-animates theological conversation in this area. Theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Sallie McFague are helpful in this consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Álabe is the property of Alabe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the animist socio-cultural fabric of the Indigenous Meitei community in Manipur, India, to locate the feminist counterspaces embedded within it through a (con)textual analysis of two short stories from the anthology Wari (2019) by the Meitei author Linthoi Chanu. In this exploration, we conceptualize a distinctive praxis of Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimism’ – intertwining Indigenous Meitei feminism with animist philosophies. Furthermore, our discussion illuminates how the Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimist’ praxis, embodying a non-dualistic and relational genderscape, prefigures the emergent Western Feminist Posthumanist theoretical discourses, particularly hydrofeminist and vital materialist concepts of fluid and entangled human embodiment. Accordingly, the present study endeavours to bridge a synergistic conversation between Indigenous Meitei ‘femanimist’ praxis and the contemporary Western theoretical currents of Feminist Posthumanities, aspiring to forge a decolonized feminist vista that transcends hierarchical binaries of gender (man/woman), humanism (human/non-human), and colonialism (the Indigenous as primitive vis-à-vis the Western as modern). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of scholarship exploring Cambodia’s cultural-religious environment alongside reinterpretations of ancient Angkorian epigraphy has illuminated the enduring sacredness of Cambodia’s ancient religious places and objects. This assertion comes despite apparent dissociation of these elements from their original ascribed identities (Brahmano-Buddhist) and disuse as focal points of politico-religious congregation at some point in the past. Although documented within Cambodian archaeological studies since the 20th century, fieldwork conducted at ancient Theravāda Buddhist monasteries (vihāra/praḥ vihār) within the Khmer civic-ceremonial center of Angkor Thom between 2017 and 2023 have substantiated that these ancient statues and holy spaces continued to serve as equivalently spiritual, highly localized arenas of ancestral animist practices and cultural-historical negotiation over time. This paper assesses several categories of these archaeological data within the framework of reidentification, reuse, and transformation beyond initial discard, including the deposition of statuary and acts of place-making in the vicinity of older ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the topic of indigenous knowledge, addressing the ethical and knowledge gaps in Eurocentric education, research, and scholarship based on examples from a participatory media venture in collaboration with people of the Wancho community of North-East India. The objective of the project is to represent the cultural insights that are integral to the local traditions through contemporary media practices and to engage a group of people from various disciplines, outlooks, and ways of life in the decolonization of indigenous representation and media practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional religions of Taiwan's Indigenous people (Austronesian speaking) are very diverse. The 16 officially recognized ethnic groups differ markedly in notions of deities, spirits, ancestors, classes of beings, and ritual groupings. This article attempts to use Philippe Descola's concept of ontology to understand their differences. I investigate how Indigenous people perceive their world through the two basic mechanisms of body and intentionality to infer similarities and differences between themselves and nonhuman beings. Three modes of identification result: animism, analogism, and totemism. Their traditional religions are often regarded as animism, rather than typical of societies identified with analogism or totemism. However, I will explore these groups' distinguishing ontological characteristics. By demonstrating the process of diversification through the religious changes since the 1950s, a new understanding of their impacts on different combinations of ontology will be obtained. This can avoid the critique that structuralist and ontological approaches ignore contemporary changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the complex Udmurt religious situation. The Udmurt, a minority group in Central Russia, have an animistic background and live today in different administrative units of the Russian Federation: they have their own Republic, Udmurtia, in which the majority of the population is composed by ethnic Orthodox Russians, but they live also, from West to East, in the Kirov oblast, in the Mari El Republic, in Tatarstan, in Bashkortostan, and in some smaller groups eastwards. In the core territory they were submitted to forced Evangelisation by the Orthodox Russians after their integration into Muscovy, in the 16th century. Eventually, the imposed conversion succeeded, while in regions where the dominant religion was Islam, and where many fled under pressure, they kept their original religious practice. This article investigates this group's religious affiliations and real practice today, between Orthodoxy and Islam, observing that where Islam dominates, animism thrives while where Orthodoxy dominates, different forms of syncretistic religious practice keep the former worldview alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Udmurt living in the Bashkortostan Republic and in the Perm' region of the Russian Federation are followers of a traditional ethnic religion. In their spiritual life, a huge place is occupied by sanctuaries and other places in which their ritual practices take place, such as the worship of deities, spirits and ancestors. We can identify different types of such places in this Udmurt regional group: the sanctuary dedicated to the cult of the clan protector deities, groves dedicated to the god Lud, places dedicated to personal and family cults, sacred places of agrarian sacrifices, territories where funerary and commemorative rituals take place, places dedicated to the propitiation of evil spirits. Depending on their social status, the sanctuaries are regional or general and can be related to a family, clan, village, or multiple villages. In this article, which relies on the authors' ethnographic fieldwork and published sources, we analyse the present state of the sacred places. We show that the transformation of cultural patterns has led some types of sanctuary to cease functioning, while others have remained as relics and the places of agrarian sacrifices have undergone an active revitalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as a preface to a special issue of the Journal of Ethnology & Folkloristics that focuses on the religion of the Finno-Ugric peoples, specifically animist religiosity and its contemporary expression. The authors highlight the lack of research on the original religious practices of the Finno-Ugric peoples, which are often overshadowed by the focus on shamanism. The special issue aims to address this gap by exploring the preservation and resilience of traditional ceremonies and practices in Finno-Ugric communities, even in areas where other religions have been adopted. The authors also discuss the challenges of terminology and the need for more neutral and accurate terms to describe these practices. The collection of papers in this special issue provides insights into the complexity of living animism in the Finno-Ugric world, with a focus on interactions between different religions, syncretism, and the persistence of non-Christian elements within predominantly Christian practices. Additionally, the article "Buying a God in Paris: Cultural Hybridity in the Thinking of Yuri Vella, Forest Nenets Intellectual" explores the concept of cultural hybridity through the perspective of Yuri Vella, a Forest Nenets intellectual. It delves into Vella's experiences and reflections on the intersection of traditional Nenets beliefs and the influence of Western culture, particularly during his time in Paris. The article offers valuable insights into the dynamics of cultural exchange and the challenges faced by individuals in maintaining their cultural heritage while engaging with other cultures [Extracted from the article]

In 2011 the independent government of Timor‐Leste initiated a controversial oil and gas infrastructure project. To persuade Timorese citizens to embrace their vision of the future based on oil and gas, supporters of the project employed narrative strategies conventionally reserved for ritual authorities. Their scaling of ritual speech to the level of the nation hinged on establishing iconic links across different event‐worlds (chronotopes). "Fiat speech" was, like infrastructure, designed to bring named realities into being through anticipation. To analyze this process of prolepsis, the concept of "anticipatory transformation" allows us to understand how oil infrastructure became not just a symbol of modernity and development but an index thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beloved presents the strategies of reconstruction of cultural identity and cultural rootseeking of African Americans. Toni Morrison presented the cultural trauma of African Americans with memory, constructing the characteristics of collective identity of African Americans, and used African animist imaginary as a cultural strategy to encode cultural trauma, depicting the cultural uniqueness in the cultural identity of African Americans. In addition, Morrison's introduction of the ghost child "abiku" in African animism belief into the novel, connecting history and reality through the representation of ghost, is not only an exploration of cultural trauma of African Americans, but also a reconstruction of the cultural psychology of the African Americans, contributing to their cultural identity. Morrison's strategies of constructing the cultural identity in Beloved not only strengthened the cultural consciousness of the nation, but also explored the cultural roots of the African Americans by depicting trauma through memory, encoding trauma through culture, and reconstructing national cultural psychology through representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Akatek Maya traditionalists in highland Guatemala regard sacrifices to living mountains as an essential world-creating act and an existential necessity. Drawing on my ethnography and description of a particular blood sacrificial ritual, preceding the advent of the New Year, I develop the concept of 'existential animism' to capture this dynamics of a continuous formation and constitution of the world and an existential, often precarious, difficult and painful, negotiation of a subject's position in it. Rethinking reciprocity as intersubjectivity, I explore sacrificial giving in terms of mutual relatedness and joint participation, characterised by the commitment to a fundamentally indeterminate, uncertain and delicate world of which we are a part and on which we depend. Finally, I argue that such phenomenologically inspired 'dwelling perspective' may be of relevance for further research on animist societies that strive to move within ambivalent landscapes and hierarchical relationships with other human as well as nonhuman beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text reflects on a short, animated film by the author, titled The Fourfold, and its exploration of the Indigenous worldviews and wisdom of Mongolia and Siberia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary debates on posthumanism and the planetary environmental crisis have led to the questioning of the dichotomies and anthropocentrism of Western modernity. The Indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco of Argentina, specifically the Qom or Toba, neither privileged the human above other beings that make up the world nor created nature/culture dichotomies. In other words they were, as other Amerindian peoples, neither humanists nor posthumanists. However, in recent decades, the Qom—who since 1960 have combined Pentecostal evangelicalism with shamanism and their particular animism—have begun to differentiate, at least discursively, religion from spirituality. If religion refers to the institutionalized evangelical universe, spirituality corresponds to what international Indigenist norms place within the "ancestral," which tends to be condemned as savage, demonic, dark, and, therefore, as something to be eradicated. The non-human beings of the natural world, the shamanic practices of healing, and the universe of vengeance and of witchcraft were always present—though questioned by official evangelicalism, now they gain greater visibility in religious spaces. This article analyzes aspects of Qom spirituality that challenge the dichotomies that the Indigenous themselves internalized and that destabilizes their perspectives. It considers how advocating a continuity that does not destroy plurality upholds the exceptionality of the human being to cause and solve a planetary crisis that, in regions such as the Gran Chaco, is directly associated with extractivism. Resumen: Los debates contemporáneos sobre el posthumanismo y la crisis medioambiental planetaria han llevado a cuestionar las dicotomías y el antropocentrismo de la modernidad occidental. Los pueblos indígenas del Gran Chaco de Argentina, concretamente los qom o toba, no privilegiaron lo humano por encima de los demás seres que conforman el mundo ni crearon dicotomías como naturaleza/cultura. En otras palabras, no son ni fueron, al igual que otros pueblos amerindios, humanistas ni posthumanistas. Sin embargo, en las últimas décadas, los qom–que desde 1960 combinan el evangelicalismo pentecostal con el chamanismo y su particular animismo- han empezado a diferenciar, al menos discursivamente, religión de espiritualidad. Si la religión se refiere al universo evangélico institucionalizado, la espiritualidad corresponde a lo que las normas indigenistas internacionales sitúan dentro de lo "ancestral", que tiende a ser condenado como salvaje, demoníaco, oscuro y, por tanto, como algo a erradicar. Los seres no-humanos del mundo natural, las prácticas chamánicas de curación y el universo de la venganza y de la brujería siempre estuvieron presentes -aunque cuestionados por el evangelismo oficial- ahora ganan mayor visibilidad en los rituales religiosos. En este artículo despliego aspectos de esta espiritualidad qom, que desafían las dicotomías que los propios indígenas internalizaron y que desestabilizan perspectivas, con el fin de considerar cómo abogar por una continuidad que no destruya la pluralidad, no sostenga la excepcionalidad del ser humano para causar y resolver una crisis planetaria que, en regiones como el Gran Chaco, están asociadas al extractivismo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the narrative of David and Bathsheba (2 Sam 11) Uriah the Hittite is encouraged by the king to go home to his wife yet refuses to do so. For some, Uriah's refusal is born out of piety and idealism, and he is unsuspecting of what has transpired between the king and his wife, Bathsheba. For others Uriah has caught wind of what has happened and realizes that David has summoned him precisely so that he should visit home, and cover David's malfeasance. A review of the evidence finds both approaches wanting. This study turns to the clinical literature concerning the challenges of homecoming from the battlefield and the emotional minefield that is combat furlough between two battlefront deployments, offering a deeper understanding of the figure of Uriah the Hittite and resolving many of the questions raised by Uriah's behavior in the narrative of 2 Sam 11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medio Period (AD 1200 to 1450) Casas Grandes shamans used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to initiate trance states that allowed their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved a sense of vertigo and soul flight that is cross-culturally common and occurs with tobacco-based nicotine intoxication. The Medio Period shamans also relied on and interacted with other-than-human persons during their travels, including macaw- and serpent-linked deities, as well as animated objects designed to participate in their shamanic journeys. The animated objects included Playas Red and Chihuahuan Polychrome pottery effigies of humans, macaws, and snakes with shamanic themes that represented the spirit world. I propose these pots were animate "pot-people" created for shamanic rituals. They were created with unusual designs including painted images and incised patterns that emphasized the spinning/vertigo that was central to the shamans' soul flight experience. In some cases, the pots were literally spun, as evidenced by the distinctive wear patterns on their bases. The shamanic designs on the pots that reflected the upper and lower worlds, the depiction of spinning in the pottery decorations, and the literal spinning of some pots reflected the sympathetic and mimetic magic that linked them to the spirit world. They were imbued with the liminal nature of the creatures they depicted, and the symbolic and occasional literal emphasis on spinning would allow them to enter into a shamanic trance in a manner similar to their human counterparts. They, thus, were designed to enter into ASC in a manner that paralleled their human counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tim Ingold draws a sharp line between animism and hylomorphism, that is, between his relational ontology and a rival genealogical ontology. He argues that genealogical hylomorphism collapses under a fallacy of circularity, while his relationism does not. Yet Ingold fails to distinguish between vicious or fallacious circles, on the one hand, and virtuous or hermeneutic circles, on the other. I demonstrate that hylomorphism and Ingold's relational animism are both virtuously circular. Hence, there is no difference between them on this count. A path thus opens for what I call hylomorphic animism. While Ingold's relational animism leads into obscurity, hylomorphic animism is able to explain the differences in power between material things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Educatio Artis Gymnasticae is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sustainability is a wicked social problem, one difficult to solve because market capitalism inevitably produces ecological precarity. Consequently, marketing requires a paradigm shift. To address this problem, this research investigates a renewal of resource circulation theory and offers a glimpse of a sustainable neo-animist system. Neo-animist theory suggests new perspectives towards a more sustainable eco-economy of persons. Neo-animism foregrounds an alternative subjectivity to that inscribed in the modern social imaginary. Neo-animism is defined by the relationality of persons, the contingent extension of the principle of sociality to other living beings, and the recognition that all living beings are in communicative relations with significant others. Further, in a neo-animism framework resources circulate through transitive value co-creation processes, gifting, reciprocal exchange, and predation. Neo-animism provides an alternative to the dominant social exchange paradigm in marketing and addresses the challenges to sustainability identified in marketing and consumer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches notions of a good life in Laos via the imaginary of the bangbot (literally: "hidden in the shade," i.e., "invisible"), a benevolent forest spirit of high moral integrity. The bangbot live in observance of the monastic precepts of Lao Buddhism deep in the jungle, far from human settlements, tying morality to undisturbed, remote forests. The article argues that this connection of morality with deep forest enables criticism and narratives about the good life at a time when "turning land into capital" is materializing in rapid deforestation. We suggest that the potential of this imaginary for socioecological criticism and alternative visions depends on social structure and historical context. While bangbot were instrumental in violent anti-colonial revolt, lending political legitimacy to rural ethnic elites, in today's context of frontier plunder vs. conservation, they are tamed to lend legitimacy to emerging urban milieus with a socioecological orientation. Thus the cultural, sociological, and ecological dynamics of Lao's late socialism are entangled in the spirit-figure of the bangbot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European tradition makes a sharp distinction between animism and science. On the basis of this distinction, either animism is reproved for failing to reach the heights of science, or science is reproved for failing to reach the heights of animism. In this essay, I draw on work in the history and philosophy and science, combined with a method from the sociology of scientific knowledge, to question the sharpness of this distinction. Along the way, I also take guidance from the research of North American Indigenous scholars. As it turns out, there is a rich, if largely overlooked, tradition of Aristotelian animism running through the history of modern European science, and this tradition sometimes resonates with Indigenous perspectives. By challenging the entrenched distinction between animism and science, I aim to help reconcile ongoing tensions between Indigenous and European scientific groups, and so strengthen prospects for their mutually beneficial cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the numerous forms of worlding that comparative anthropology has identified, two of them, analogism and animism, show an interesting set of similarities and differences although they are predicated upon very different ontological premises. Analogism refers to a fragmented world made up of a multiplicity of components that must be held together through networks of correspondences, while animism presupposes a world composed of self-reflexive and sentient human and non-human beings who differ from one another by their bodily dispositions, not by their moral and subjective capacities. However, in certain parts of the world—Southeast Asia, Northwest Amazonia, and Northern Central Asia—we find a blending of these features, and this will be the subject of this lecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invention of Shipibo visionary paintings in the Western Amazon by the collective of artists and shamans, Barin Bababo, seems to challenge the idealist thesis that the hybridity of contemporary indigenous art and its commercialization in the Western art market would constitute a cultural degradation of "traditional" indigenous art. The works, at the crossroads of shamanic practices based on an animistic worldview and the ability of their creators to weave social networks beyond their ethnic group, appear to represent, on the contrary, a means of expressing a form of resilience in response to the transformations that Shipibo society is currently experiencing in the context of globalization. The "cultural in-between" position of shaman painters, from which the success of their artistic productions with a Western audience of "shaman tourists" derives, challenges the classical dichotomy that opposes "modernity" and "tradition" making of the components of the past a form of cultural renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the first installment of Qiu Anxiong’s trilogy of animations New Book of Mountains and Seas (2006, 2008, 2017). Replete with fantastical creatures, Qiu’s films immediately call to mind their namesake, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, an encyclopedia of strange beasts written and compiled between the fourth to first century BCE. His animations show the contemporary world as if seen through the eyes of someone living thousands of years ago, alive during the time of the original classic. Rather than casting this subject-position as “irrational” and backwards, Qiu mines the generative possibilities of adopting this new logic of perception. In doing so, he brings together two distinct ways of presenting the world. The first relays the modern myths and universal assumptions constituting our contemporary reality. The second destabilizes divisions between the animate and inanimate to challenge how this narrative led to the disavowal of animism to begin with. In restituting animism, the artist offers an alternative to the pictured story of predation, extraction, and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Can humanity survive climate change and mass extinction? Concepts of humanity assumed or implicit in the field at the founding of this journal are under critical pressure from multiple directions. Reading across schools of thought confronting relations sometimes called Anthropocene, this essay explains five tasks for religious ethics "after humanity:" (i) incorporate species‐level relations of power and vulnerability; (ii) denaturalize planetary myth‐making; (iii) undo colonial humanisms; (iv) recompose ways of life after the end of the world; and (v) reanimate ethical inquiry in attentiveness to multispecies worldmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary return toward mimesis turns in at least two directions. The first doubles down on Plato's suspicion of mimesis as a contagious threat to rationality and the healthy functioning of the polis and in this sense advocates, at the level of human behaviour, a turning away from mimesis and the pathological, all-too-human nature of homo mimeticus. The second form of the mimetic turn is a more wholehearted turning towards mimesis, seen not as contagious pathology but as cure, as planetary solution to our all-too-human modes of being in the world. This essay is interested in this second, utopian turn towards mimesis, charting the dialectical re-emergence of homo mimeticus as homo ecologicus in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Noongar novelist Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]