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A movement known as “new animism” is gaining ground around the world. Its followers believe that everything in nature has a soul. Among them are environmental activists who hope that people will adopt more ecologically sustainable practices if they understand that humans have obligations toward the natural world, including mountains and rivers.
The word animism was first coined by an early anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, in 1870, writes Wesleyan University anthropologist Justine Buck Quijada. Since then, it has come to describe practices that recognize that places, animals and plants have power over people – such as what can be done near a glacier or how to represent the will of mountains in political negotiations.
This week we also liked articles about COVID-19 tests, writer’s block and the lack of ethnic diversity on the U.K.‘s coins and cash.
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Shamans from the organization Tengeri conduct an offering ritual in 2013 to Bukhe Bator, the spirit master of the Selenga River, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation.
Roberto Quijada
Justine Buck Quijada, Wesleyan University
Animism describes religions in which humans are connected to the landscape around them but do not dominate it.
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Something people today have in common with civilizations past: a love of music.
peepo/E+ via Getty Images
Laura Dallman, University of Florida
For thousands of years, music has been an essential part of the human experience.
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About 4.5 billion bank notes and more than 27 billion coins featuring the queen’s image are now circulating in the U.K.
Daniel Harvey Gonzalez/In Pictures via Getty Images
Harcourt Fuller, Georgia State University
The new money – featuring the visage of King Charles III – will start rolling out by December 2022.
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Stefan Stern, City, University of London
The top office is not a playground for ideological experiment.
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Samuel L. Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
Simchat Torah is about more than beginning to read the Torah all over again. It’s about the need to reexamine what we think we know, over and over again.
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Nathaniel Hafer, UMass Chan Medical School; Apurv Soni, UMass Chan Medical School; Yukari Manabe, Johns Hopkins University
Rapid tests can be an incredibly useful tool for early detection of COVID-19. Unfortunately, they sometimes leave people with more questions than answers.
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