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ANIMISM_HUMAN_WORLD

                                          August 31, 2022

The small project at hand is this:
                                                         ANIMISM_CREATIONS
  People writing about "animism"
  typically frame it as "everything has a
  spirit, including 'inanimate objects'".     Except they don't actually say
                                              'inanimate objects', because once
     But okay, so everything has a            you find yourself saying "the
     spirit, including things we              inanimate is animate" you balk.
     think of as "objects", and
     every single person writing
     about animism (including the
     people who like to think of
     themselves as animists) are
     surrounded by the creations of
     human beings: chairs, desks,
     walls, writing implements, and
     so on.

       I ask what seems like an obvious question to me: for
       the animist, do these human creations have a spirit?

           It's remarkably difficult to get a straight
           answer to this-- I might think the answer
           would have to be "yes", but I can imagine
           people who would want to answer "no" or
           perhaps "only sometimes", but addressing the
           point directly is pretty rare, certainly
           out there "on the web", the web we access
           with basic "web searches".
              
           I end up looking at the *examples* people    
           cite of objects-with-a-spirit, and they        A rare exception: a
           almost invariably cite natural objects,        brief viedo note
           like rocks and trees and so on.                from a neo-pagan on
                                                          youtube suggesting
                                                          that the urban
      But there are other webs than "the web"             animist might
      and starting again with a google scholar            consider the spirits
      search on "animism", I turned up some               of old buildings
      additional exceptions.                              which acquire some
                                                          sort of energy from
                                                          their long history
                                                          of association with
                                                          human beings.

                                                              The "haunted
                                                              house" doctrine.

I see today the scholar.google.com
page sports the slogan:
                                      https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=animism&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
  "Stand on the shoulders of giants"

So it is perhaps unfortunate that a
search on "animism" shows "Graham Harvey"       ANIMISM_HARVEY
in it's first two links.


Out of the first 13 pages of search
results (a pool of ~130 hits), I found a
number of papers that fit the category of
human-creations-with-spirit, including
precisely four with a classic
anthropological flavor, from the
tradition of studing cultures distant in         ANIMISM_CLASSIC
space and/or time from your own...


There's also a cluster of papers on a
subject I should've expected but for some
reason did not: in the modern world of        These point bores me to
"artificial intelligence", many people        tears, but that's quite
feel they're living in a world where          likely just my problem.
there are personalities in the gadgets
around them.                                             ANIMISM_GIDGET


There's also a paper on childrens
perception of robots and one about motifs
in children's literature-- the suggestion     ANIMISM_KIDBOTS
here is that kids are natural "animists".

                                              This one is interesting,
                                              because Tylor's original idea
And there's one very prominent link           of "animism" was that it was
that got me very interested, but              "primitive": the universal
turns out to be a fake-out...                 starting place for humanity
                                              which needed to be unlearned by
     MACHINIC_ANIMISM                         the civilized.

                                                 Anthropologists have long
                                                 since gotten over their
                                                 condescending view of
                                                 "savages"-- and the modern
                                                 academics of the more "woke"
                                                 persuasion are even more
                                                 averse-- but it could be that
                                                 Tylor's original view has
                                                 elements that deserve to be
                                                 salvaged.



So, in total, I've identified:

   ANIMISM_CLASSICS    4  hits
   ANIMISM_GIDGET      5  hits
   ANIMISM_KIDBOTS     2  hits
   MACHINIC_ANIMISM    0  hits

That's 11 out of ~130, around 8%.





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