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because you can see it. touch it. this is what animism is. normative consciousness. it is not some thing over there you have been in non-negotiable contact with objects and their forces your entire life. it's not been an option for your body to not be
if you're in a yurt, trying to root into the earth, don't imagine an earth. you don't need to imagine anything. connect with the yurt first. you will become aware of the earth underneath you. the actual earth. not imagined
because for most of human history, animism has not been an -ism it's just been... the way things are like that's just what direct experience of the world is like animism is normative consciousness https://t.co/E3vVBypc62
"animism is normative consciousness" taken directly from a podcast episode from The Emerald of the same name https://t.co/WKCX6m0jmo
what we might call "animism" then is just familiarity and skill navigating these experiential realities https://t.co/x9lvwmI3sx
it can be something like this https://t.co/033wX664ol
my main “meditative” practice is spending at least 1hr a day sensorially checking in with the rhythms of local nature this looks like: walking, saying hi to the local crows, touching lots of plants, attuning to the seasonal shifts in the trees & sunlight & smell of the air https://t.co/gwQrhx1WoR
elena is not imagining the crows or singing to an ocean far away she went outside https://t.co/CT5jb9SJoA
imagining crows & singing to oceans far away is also animacy because thought & memory & imagination are animate but in a world steeped in abstraction & devoid of sense memory, any attempt at it not grounded in the tangible & local first risks being abstraction, aestheticised
good point "animism is normative consciousness" is kind of a pained phrase but the gesture of it is... the world is already alive, just look the world is already alive, look https://t.co/7xgXDIWW7n
@AskYatharth i was trying to gesture at this here i think https://t.co/wX9SjzW7G2
@eigenrobot ah, fascinating. the origins of gender and animacy! https://t.co/Ui5oMxrj9N
one of those questions that sort of encapsulates the whole thing >What does it mean to live in a profoundly alive world? https://t.co/5qPjeUqSh6
oh, and in case "phones" don't feel a topic for animists https://t.co/qSgIG9QSRL
i didn't realise this, but we live in the stone age. except our stones are quartz and silicon and live in our pockets humanity has never quite escaped stone. the various ages of european pre-history, the stone age, bronze age, iron age, and now, the silicon age, all stone ages
@AskYatharth ugh don't spread the "animism is normative consciousness" meme. at least not in that phrasing, in which basically every morpheme has the opposite connotation from what it's trying to mean https://t.co/r52X8zGYbl
@relic_radiation "normative" implies that it's right via some codified rule, some cultural convention *normal* consciousness is better insofar as "normal" means "typical" and he's saying "99.9% of humans ever", though it still means "conforming" which is the OPPOSITE of saying it's natural! https://t.co/iiSxkUOBnR
@AskYatharth to be clear, I love your thread and the point you're making. it's amazing, and I'm glad I can now get the point without having to listen to this guy say that dumb catchphrase so many times https://t.co/ocxf1BWlWI
@relic_radiation I started listening to this and ragequit after 15 minutes because I couldn't stand how he kept just repeating the phrase "animism is normative consciousness" he didn't have the courage to drop the -ism, despite decrying it and "normative" means the opposite of what he wants
@Malcolm_Ocean thank you, now that i think about it, it's a pained phrase, in that its straining to communicate something awesome but making like a sacrifice with language that's not worth it it's self-defeating https://t.co/NiZRqdkdxf
@Malcolm_Ocean The Emerald is simultaneously my new favourite podcast but i remember it still feeling... anthropological still intellectually gawking, instead of being from within Braiding Sweetgrass feels very different. it's from within the thing, sharing out
@Malcolm_Ocean which... to be fair... i met the guy, and he's careful to say he's not a traditional lineage holder. just a guy who studied this stuff but there's a way i could imagine of simply *speaking* from within whatever he has rooted in his life and is sprouting back out
two points here for @Malcolm_Ocean - I actually asked Josh about this phrasing and he says his choice of the word “normative” was a direct response to some other anthropologist who used that word. so he’s like “yah I probably could have used a better word” but now it is an artifact of attention fossils and physics - the repetition of it is part of the trance, storytelling atmosphere. so if it stylistically grates on you that’s why, it might be a genre you’re not used to or perhaps simply don’t like
@relic_radiation @AskYatharth no no, repeating a phrase is great! the phrase is just extremely bad. and in particular, that phrase was bad for repeating, because the trance it was trying to take me into was afaict in the OPPOSITE direction of animacy-primacy (which is how I might put it)
@relic_radiation @AskYatharth "animacy is primal consciousness" play on words here with "primal" but it'll be lost on most and probably miss the point "primitive"? "primary"? I like the word "primacy". "prior"? "foundational"?
@relic_radiation @AskYatharth I think he is/was actually confused, also, like he DID seem to be trying to make a commonness-to-normativity argument, which again: opposite direction from early consciousness, which was (as far as I can tell from what I've stared at) profoundly non-normative & non-argumentative
@Malcolm_Ocean i'm thinking about it more and wtf... normative is like the exact opposite word? lmao i can see how if you were thinking about the word, it would strike someone as so wrong (i was not thinking too much while listening)
@AskYatharth yeah it made me completely unable to take that guy seriously like it would be one thing if he just uttered the phrase once as a throwaway, but he like... devotes himself to it! he repeats it so many times!!