When Stones Come to
Life
Researchers ponder the curious human tendency to view all sorts
of things as alive
The widespread tendency to attribute
life to all sorts of objects and events may arise in the course of forming
close relationships with features of one's environment.
References:
Bird-David, N. 1999. "Animism" revisited. Current Anthropology
40(February):S67.
Guthrie, S.E. 1993. Faces in the Clouds. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lillard, A. 1998. Ethnopsychologies: Cultural variations in theories
of mind. Psychological Bulletin 123(January):3.
Further Readings:
Bower, B. 1996. Digging into natural-world insights. Science News
150(Nov. 16):308.
______. 1993. A child's theory of mind. Science News 144(July
17):40.
Ingold, T. 1997. Life beyond the edge of nature? Or, the mirage of
society. In The Mark of the Social, J.B. Greenwood, ed. Lanham,
Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Sources:
Scott Atran
University of Michigan
Institute for Social Research
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
Nurit Bird-David
University of Haifa
Department of Social Anthropology
Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905
Israel
Tim Ingold
University of Manchester
Department of Social Anthropology
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
England
Angeline Lillard
University of Virginia
Department of Psychology
102 Gilmer Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22903-2477
Gísli Pálsson
University of Iceland
Department of Anthropology
101 Reykjavik
Iceland
From Science
News, Vol. 155, No. 23, June 5, 1999, p. 360.
Copyright © 1999, Science Service.
