Environmental Humanities is pleased to announce that the winner of our 2024 Best Article Prize, given to an article published in the journal’s pages in the preceding year, is “When Gods Drown in Plastic: Vietnamese Whale Worship, Environmental Crises, and the Problem of Animism,” by Aike P. Rots and Nhung Lu Rots, which appeared in the November 2023 issue.
This article offers an insightful reexamination of the claim that animistic religious belief necessarily leads to more sustainable environmental relations. Through a study of Vietnamese whale worship practices combined with everyday capitalistic practices on the coasts, the authors show that deep spiritual reverence for the more-than-human does not easily translate into environmentally friendly actions. As they note, “Fishers who worship the whale god do not live in a premodern, traditional, enchanted world,” so capitalist pressures from the fishing and tourist industries are integrated into everyday life. The authors’ conclusion that “the fact that these traditions are based on principles of relationality and reciprocity does not mean they automatically translate into twenty-first-century environmental ethics” offers a fundamentally new approach to how scholars should approach animism.
We also issue a commendation to “Metabolic Strata, Corporeal Sediment,” by Andrea Marston, which appeared in the November 2023 issue as part of the “Earth as Praxis” special section. This article creatively looks for the geosocial traces of tin through mines, tin-plated cans, and pulmonary lesions. Marston demonstrates the immense value of a metabolic approach to global commodity chains, in which “geologic materials can circulate through both social systems and individual human bodies, metabolized in ways that are ubiquitous yet uneven.” This connects production, consumption, and circulation in hitherto unexplored ways, providing a model for future environmental humanities work.
Environmental Humanities, published by Duke University Press, gives out a Best Article Prize annually to an article published in the pages of Environmental Humanities during the preceding calendar year. The award identifies and encourages innovative and well-written research in the broad field of environmental humanities, including both theoretical and applied contributions. The winner is chosen by the editorial team in collaboration with the journal’s scholarly oversight committee.
