Animism

Although each culture has its own different mythologies and rituals, 'animism' is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' 'spiritual' or 'supernatural' perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to 'animism' (or even 'religion'); the term is an anthropological construct. Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinion has differed on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world, or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the late 19th century (1871) by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as 'one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first'. Animism encompasses the beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans, but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural environment. Animism may further attribute a life force to abstract concepts such as words, true names or metaphors in mythology. Some members of the non-tribal world also consider themselves animists (such as author Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan and many contemporary Pagans). Earlier anthropological perspectives, which have since been termed the 'old animism', were concerned with knowledge on what is alive and what factors make something alive. The 'old animism' assumed that animists were individuals who were unable to understand the difference between persons and things.Critics of the 'old animism' have accused it of preserving 'colonialist and dualist worldviews and rhetoric'. The idea of animism was developed by the anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, in which he defined it as 'the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general'. According to Tylor, animism often includes 'an idea of pervading life and will in nature'; a belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. That formulation was little different from that proposed by Auguste Comte as 'fetishism', but the terms now have distinct meanings. For Tylor, animism represented the earliest form of religion, being situated within an evolutionary framework of religion which has developed in stages and which will ultimately lead to humanity rejecting religion altogether in favor of scientific rationality.Thus, for Tylor, animism was fundamentally seen as a mistake, a basic error from which all religion grew. He did not believe that animism was inherently illogical, but he suggested that it arose from early humans' dreams and visions and thus was a rational system. However, it was based on erroneous, unscientific observations about the nature of reality. Stringer notes that his reading of Primitive Culture led him to believe that Tylor was far more sympathetic in regard to 'primitive' populations than many of his contemporaries and that Tylor expressed no belief that there was any difference between the intellectual capabilities of 'savage' people and Westerners. Tylor had initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as 'spiritualism' but realised that would cause confusion with the modern religion of Spiritualism, that was then prevalent across Western nations. He adopted the term 'animism' from the writings of the German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl, who, in 1708, had developed the term animismus as a biological theory that souls formed the vital principle and that the normal phenomena of life and the abnormal phenomena of disease could be traced to spiritual causes. The first known usage in English appeared in 1819. The idea that there had once been 'one universal form of primitive religion' (whether labelled 'animism', 'totemism', or 'shamanism') has been dismissed as 'unsophisticated' and 'erroneous' by the archaeologist Timothy Insoll, who stated that 'it removes complexity, a precondition of religion now, in all its variants'.