Animism

Animism (from Latin, anima, “breath” or “soul”), term used in several distinct theories about the nature of the world, life and/or personhood. It is best known as the term used by the 19th-century British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, who described the origin of religion and primitive beliefs in terms of animism.

In Primitive Culture (1871) Tylor defined animism as the general belief in spiritual beings and considered it “a minimum definition of religion”. He asserted that all religions, from the simplest to the most complex, involve some form of animism. According to Tylor, “primitive peoples”, defined as those without written traditions, believe that spirits or souls are the cause of life in human beings and picture souls as phantoms, resembling vapours or shadows, which can transmigrate from person to person, from the dead to the living, and from and into plants, animals, and lifeless objects. But he also argued that his Christian contemporaries held more highly evolved versions of the same mistaken, but understandable, belief in non-empirical entities (souls and deity).

Tylor took the term animism from the 18th-century German doctor and chemist Georg Ernst Stahl, who had coined the word to describe his theory that the soul is the vital principle responsible for organic development. Stahl argued that just as flammable matter (for example, wood) is distinct from inflammable matter (for example, stone) because the former possesses “phlogiston”, so living matter (the bodies of living people) are distinct from inanimate material (the physical constituents of rocks and corpses) because the former possess “anima”. These theories were already out of fashion when Tylor adopted the term (but not the theory) to label what he considered to be the essence of religion. Tylor had intended to use the term “Spiritualism” but as that was already in use as the name of a specific religious movement, he chose “animism” instead.

In deriving his theory, Tylor asserted that an animistic philosophy developed in an attempt to explain the causes of sleep, dreams, trances, and death; the difference between a living body and a dead one; and the nature of the images that one sees in dreams and trances. In criticizing Tylor’s theory, the British anthropologist Robert R. Marett claimed that primitives could not have been so intellectual and that religion must have had a more emotional, intuitional origin. He rejected Tylor's theory that all objects were regarded as being alive. Marett thought that early humans must have recognized some lifeless objects and probably regarded only those objects that had unusual qualities or that behaved in some seemingly unpredictable or mysterious way as being alive. He held, moreover, that the ancient concept of vitality was not sophisticated enough to include the notion of a soul or spirit residing in the object. Instead, people treated the objects they considered animate as if these things had life, feeling, and a will of their own, but did not make a distinction between the body of an object and a soul that could enter or leave it. Marett called this view “animatism” or “preanimism”, and he claimed that animism had to arise out of animatism, which may even continue to exist alongside more highly developed animistic beliefs.

While Tylor’s theory was an attempt to define religion, and Marett’s theory was about the origins of human culture, both sought evidence among contemporary indigenous people and cultures. This has led to the term animism being used in another distinct way—as a label for the alleged beliefs and practices of indigenous people. It is, for example, sometimes used as the name of a religious system in West Africa in contrast with “Christianity” and “Islam”. Acceptance of the term by some indigenous religious people has, in turn, paved the way for a new academic use of the word animism.

This “new animism” respectfully approaches indigenous ways of life and worldviews to understand how they engage with a world that is understood to be a community of living beings or “persons”. Research on the Nayaka of India has led anthropologists to argue that “animism” is not a confusion about what is alive or human-like, but a relational approach to knowing who is a person or who is relating as a significant person in a particular encounter. The Ojibwa (Anishinaabeg) of southern-central Canada were the subject of much anthropological research in the mid-20th century. After studying the way of life of the Ojibwa, anthropologists concluded that “person” is a category larger than “humanity” and includes a wide range of beings who may be found to be persons when they engage relationally together. The question for Ojibwa and other animists according to this new theory of animism is not “what is alive?” or “what is like humans?” but “what is the appropriate way to treat and act towards a person?” Decisions about whether one is confronted by an object or a person are tested in the light of evidence about whether respect and gifts are given and/or received in particular encounters.

In parallel with these different theories of animism, academics interested in consciousness use the term “panpsychism” to label theories that matter is inherently conscious and that all beings have some sense of “what it is like to be” themselves, for example, a sense of interiority or a psychology.