Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
Posts Tagged ‘animism’
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, biosemiotics, cosmopolitics, Descola, Latour, panpsychism, Peirce, Stengers, Whitehead on January 10, 2011 | 15 Comments »
Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic […]
On anthropomorphism: making humans, pencils, & souls
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, Jung, Latour, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead on December 29, 2010 | 8 Comments »
Tim Morton has recently been suggesting that just as humans anthropomorph (that’s a verb), so pencils pencilmorph. I love this idea, though I’m not sure about its implications, which I want to think through here. Anthropomorphism #1 (traditional, & its extensions) The traditional definition of anthropomorphism is something like “the attribution of human characteristics to […]
Avatar’s global affects
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animism, anthropology, Avatar, Decolonization, ecopolitics, ecopsychology, film, Hollywood, indigenous, paganism, pantheism on February 15, 2010 | 51 Comments »
It’s been fascinating to watch the unfolding public conversation about Avatar (much of which, come to think of it, my early review had anticipated): environmentalist celebrations of how it portrays the Earth rising up against the megamachine of capitalism and patriarchy; critiques of how the film perpetuates the stereotyping of indigenous people and reiterates tropes of their salvation by white male messiah figures; the Vatican’s and religious right’s denunciations of its pantheism; the film’s advance of technological wizardry into the domain of a virtual hyperreality, like The Matrix but replacing that film’s gnosticism with a pantheistic new age science of networks and neural systems; and debates over the balance struck in the film between good spectacle (the high-tech stuff) and bad narrative (poor writing, flat characterization, stereotypes all over), or between bad spectacle (Spielbergian gee-whiz stuff) and good narrative (such as the film’s allegorization of global capitalism’s destruction of indigenous communities). Film Studies for Free has usefully summarized the various allegorical readings of the film proposed so far, many of which get articulated in conversations and comments by viewers in various blogs, op-ed commentaries, and social networking sites. [more]
fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ambiguous objects, animacy, animism, art, eco-art, entropy, paganism, relationalism on September 20, 2009 | 56 Comments »
One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by […]
polar bag
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged animals, animism, eco-art, ecomedia, mortality on April 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Ambient electroacoustic artists Stars of the Lid do a beautiful job with thisEnvironmental Defense Fund NYC subway ad campaign video. The other ads in the series can be viewed here.
rigpa meets anima…
Posted in Eco-theory, Uncategorized, tagged animism, Buddhism, Dzogchen on December 14, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Rigpa is the state of compassionate awareness that, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is the innermost nature of the mind. It is the primordial, nondual mind that shines through when unobscured; intelligent, cognizant, awake. “Empty in essence, cognizant in nature, unconfined in capacity.” Recognizing and dwelling within rigpa is the goal of Dzogchen practice (a kind […]
immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged animism, deconstruction, Deleuze, Derrida, immanence, immanent naturalism, Lacan, paganism, pantheism, religion, Zizek on December 14, 2008 | 2 Comments »
On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as […]
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