The World Factbook

it's associated with shamans, ancestral spirits, religious traditions that are often seen as the inverse of big, organized religions with texts, institutions, and doctrine.

If you check out the CIA World Factbook, you'll see countries cited as having a certain percentage of their population as being animist.

Burkina Faso, Burma, Cameroon, Guinea-Bissau.

So we're seeing two possibly interrelated ways of using animism, first as a way to describe modern indigenous religions, as well as calling animism the earliest religion.

This is going to be the title for today, Dave.

I'm still pissed off about the CIA World Factbook.

It was retired, I believe it was February of this year.

And no notice, too.

Five

condensed paragraphs that would be explainable to a sixth grader.

I mean, this is actually very lazy teaching, but I have taught whole lessons around the CIA World Factbook.

And you know what? I actually have had people come back to me and go, I remember all of this obscure stuff.

Here is another map.

This is from the CIA's World Factbook.

That's interesting that he chose that one.

The CIA World Factbook actually closed down a couple of years ago, but still interesting that he chose that.

And then once again, new America.

So just over and over and over again, driving this point home.

You can take it as read that we've travelled back to the present day for round three, which is called Banner in the Works.

Promoted from its usual round four slot, and requiring as little explanation as usual, it's a description of a country's national flag, taken from the archive of the recently defunct CIA World Factbook, because they no longer need facts.

And you just tell me the country each time.

Capisce? Cool.