I took part in a tour to discover shrines in back alleys, in parking lots and hawker centers. Our guide wasted no time in stating that she wasn't into "superstition and all that". The focus of the tour were to her "just" cultural expressions of the different communities where those shrines appeared. According to her, practices involving non-human presences were an activity for old people, and not very widespread with the younger generation. Yes, of course I don't want to be seen as a hippie, but I believe we will be able to enter another era where we speak of living presences around us without shame. Fuck Descartes!
On the tour we encountered shrines which seemed to have "come from nowhere". They appeared suddenly, not requiring a priest to consecrate the space. The shrines were first set up to honour the area spirit or deity by those who worked in the back alleys and who perhaps wouldn't show up in the "proper" temples. Sometimes shrines would also disappear again. It is thanks to this tour that there is documentation on some altars that have gone through transformations and eventually have disappeared again.
There was a phase where people thought they could control, monitor, and ultimately optimise their lives. Even I had a bracelet that was supposed to motivate me to do my daily 10.000 steps. (I guess these days it has transformed into mobile smartwatches with far more features.) But with instabilities in societies and nations I personally feel that there is so much that I can't control. My own agency doesn't have the reach to bring about the changes necessary for the planet's future. So I absolutely can understand creating relationships with the place we're in, with non-human presences around us.
I'm afraid the process of objectifying the world has also turned us—the very people who thought we were the subjects and agents of observation—into objects ourselves. Perhaps post-colonial animism is the process of de-objectifying, allowing us to stop performing as "modern people" who have everything under control.