Animism

Animism is from the Latin anima (soul, breath)[1]. The term was coined in its modern technical sense by the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor in 1871 to name what he believed was the original form of religion: the belief that the natural world is populated by spirits[2]. The term has become contested in religious studies because of its colonial origins and the way it tends to flatten diverse traditions into a single category.

many scholars use the term cautiously because of its colonial baggage and oversimplifying history.

What Tylor called animism is now usually described more carefully as the recognition of personhood, agency, or sacred presence in beings beyond humans: in animals, plants, rocks, rivers, mountains, ancestors, and named spirits. This recognition is widespread across Indigenous traditions globally, and elements of it appear in major world religions as well.

Specific examples: Shinto kami are present in many features of the natural world; African and African Diaspora traditions recognize spirits and powers in many domains; Indigenous American traditions often hold relationships with specific animals, plants, and landscape features as religious relationships; Hindu and Buddhist traditions include nature spirits, sacred rivers and mountains, and complex cosmologies of beings; Celtic and Norse pre-Christian religion included spirits of place and named non-human persons.

Modern scholarship has moved away from treating animism as primitive religion or as a single explanatory category. Anthropologists including Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Graham Harvey have proposed reframings: relational ontologies, perspectivism, the new animism. The shared insight: many traditions experience the world as populated by a wider range of persons than modern Western secular thought recognizes, and this is a different ontology rather than a defective one.

The recovery of animist sensibility has influenced contemporary environmental thought, ecology, and movements that argue for ascribing personhood to rivers, forests, and mountains[3]. The recent legal recognition of personhood for specific rivers in New Zealand and India draws on Indigenous traditions of relational ontology.

The term animism has a contested history. Tylor's coinage placed it in an evolutionary framework that treated it as primitive[2]. Twentieth and twenty-first century scholars have developed sharply different reframings. Graham Harvey's Animism: Respecting the Living World is one major contemporary reframing[3]. The category remains useful but needs careful handling.

• Animism: Respecting the Living Worldby Graham Harvey
  book
• Beyond Nature and Cultureby Philippe Descola
  book