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New Mythologies

Finding fresh meaning in ancient wisdom amid an uncertain world

How do we make sense of a world that is splintering around us? New Mythologies explores the resurgence of localism in a globalised world, and the value of looking to the past to inform the future.

Times are not as they once were. Old political alliances are falling apart, healthcare and economic structures are being challenged, and climate change is ripping up the rulebook for how the planet should work. Against this backdrop, traditional power structures are being upended. Individuals are coming together at grassroots levels to drive changes that institutions or governments cannot, and voices that have long been marginalised are challenging the legacies of colonialism, and revitalising indigenous cultures in the process. In the face of rapid

change, people are also looking to the past to glean wisdom from ancient knowledge and customs.

For A/W 21/22, these shifts will see craft, artisanal skills and resourcefulness valued anew across design industries. Local nuances such as patterns and patchworks will be celebrated, and consumers will be prioritising the provenance of their purchases and looking for items they can keep for a lifetime, not just a season. Natural materials, organic ingredients and bio-innovations will be cherished, and recycling and circular production processes will be championed.

In this direction, bigger is not always better, and the new is no more valuable than the old.

Decorative Accessories A/W 21/22: New Mythologies By Melissa Taylor / 04.07.20

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Artists, institutions and organisations are uncovering a range of knowledge, from vanished and defunct information to alternative narratives that have been overshadowed by new ideologies. This emerging trend pinpoints a shift that is currently taking place, where projects, exhibits and initiatives attempt to recontextualise the world as we know it.

The social power of art is recognised as a tool for dismantling colonial legacies and shining a light on underrepresented figures in our biased presentation of history. This report spotlights the pioneers of this shift whose focus on uncovering knowledge and historical revisionism are helping write a more inclusive future.

Uncovered Knowledge: New Narratives By Sarah Owen / 02.13.20

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Pew Research Center's Global Religious Futures database offers religious demography and survey results for almost every country of the world. Explore today.

Overview

As of 2010, an estimated 405 million people – or about 6% of the world's total population – were adherents of folk or traditional religions, and that number is expected to grow to 450 million by 2050. This increase will not keep pace with overall population growth, however, and the folk religion population is expected to drop to roughly 5% of the total world population in the decades ahead.

Adherents of folk religions, as of 2010, were most prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region, where nine-in-ten (90%) members of the world’s folk religion population resided. The remaining followers of folk religions were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa (7%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (between 2% and 3%). In the decades ahead, the share of the world’s folk religion population living in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to decline somewhat, to 82% by 2050, while the shares living in sub-Saharan Africa and the Latin America-Caribbean region are expected to increase (to 14% and more than 3%, respectively).

Folk religions are closely tied to a particular people, ethnicity or tribe. In some cases, elements of other world religions are blended with local beliefs and customs. These faiths often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions.

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This tension is expressed in the many different subsequent conceptualizations of folk or popular religion, of which Charles Long, in a very useful summative article (1987), lists seven:

1.Popular religion is virtually identical to peasant culture, characterized by orality as opposed to a literate elite.

2.Popular religion is the religion of the laity as opposed to the religion of the educated clergy.

3.Popular religion refers to the pervasive beliefs and rituals of a society and its public institutions, as in the notion of “civil religion.”

4.Popular religion is an amalgam of esoteric practices different from the common religion, often practiced in the lower strata of society.

5.Popular religion is the religion of a subclass or minority group.

6.Popular religion is the religion of the masses as opposed to the religion of the highly cultured.

7.Popular religion is an ideological creation of elites, promoted through folklore societies, museums, historical and ethnographic research, and so on.

Most statements in this list posit the existence of a cultural field in which “popular religion” is identified with the lower or marginal positions in a hierarchy of power and knowledge, while the seventh definition argues that popular religion itself is the knowledge production of those at the top of the cultural field, looking downwards at the “people” and organizing, classifying, and inscribing what they see within the framework of ideological, state-building, or identity-building projects.

Palmer, D. A. (2019). Folk, Popular, or Minjian Religion?, Review of Religion and Chinese Society, 6(2), 155-159. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00602001