This episode was recorded on May 4th, 2025.

My guest for this episode Christos Galanis - an interdisciplinary artist, cultural geographer, Animist, and ritual facilitator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work intricately weaves themes of displacement, ancestry, and the sacred, drawing from a rich tapestry of personal history, ethnography, and experiential practices.

Christos earned a BFA in Integrated Music Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, an MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico and a PhD in Cultural Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

Christos is the fourth generation of men in his family to emigrate from their country of birth, a lineage that profoundly influences his exploration of themes like displacement and belonging.

In our conversation, we explored the meaning of animism as a lived framework rather than a nostalgic return to ancient belief. We talked about how Christos’ identity as a first-generation Greek-American informs his relationship to place, ancestry, and belonging. 

We talked about the philosophical shift from relational to categorical thinking found in modernity, that prioritized measurement over meaning. We discussed how indigenous animist perspectives challenge the foundations of modern science, especially around knowledge, truth, and verification.

We talked about the legacy of monotheism, the ideological drive for universality, and how Judaism stands apart as a practice-based tradition still deeply rooted in place. We talked about the entanglement of place, ritual, and identity, and how the loss of locality contributes to existential disconnection.

We talked about political animism as a potential alternative to left-right paradigms, about grief as a doorway to transformation, and about the struggle to live ethically in a world built on disconnection.