Animism

• 1. Introduction

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  Animism is the belief that rivers, rocks, animals, storms and even words carry a spirit of their own. Among many indigenous peoples, the idea is so basic to daily life that their languages have no word for animism. Often they have no word for religion either. The label comes from outside, invented by scholars who needed a name for a view of the world that its holders never felt the need to name.

  Animists hold that agency and free will are spread through the world instead of being reserved for humans. They see no firm border between the spiritual and the physical. A mountain, a water sprite or a tree spirit can count as someone rather than something. Some animists even grant a life force to true names and to metaphors in mythology.

  Scholars still disagree about what kind of thing animism is. Some call it a religion in its own right. Others call it an ancestral way of experiencing the world that sits beneath many religions. A 2016 study even traced animism back to the oldest shared beliefs of early human cultures.

  This documentary asks who gave the idea its name and why the first scholars to study it called it a mistake. It asks how the idea looks in practice, from Arctic hunts to Japanese shrines. And it asks why some thinkers now treat animism as a serious guide to living among other beings.

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• 2. Naming The Belief

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  In 1708 the German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl coined the word animismus for a biological theory. He argued that souls were the vital principle of the body, and that both healthy life and disease could be traced to spiritual causes. The root is the Latin anima, which means life or soul. English writers first used the word in 1819.

  The English anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor borrowed Stahl's term for a different purpose. He had first wanted to call the phenomenon spiritualism. He dropped that plan because spiritualism was already a living modern religion across Western nations, and the two would be confused.

  Tylor's 1871 book Primitive Culture gave animism the definition that scholars still start from. He called it "the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general". He added that it often carries "an idea of pervading life and will in nature".

  For Tylor, animism was the first step on an evolutionary ladder of religion. He expected humanity to climb through stages until it finally gave up religion for scientific rationality. In that scheme animism was a basic error, the mistake from which every later faith grew. Yet he did not call it illogical. He thought dreams and visions led early people to a reasoned system that rested on faulty observations.

  Tylor also expected belief in spirits to fade as societies became more scientific. Any leftover ideas about souls were, to him, survivals of humanity's original animism. A later reader named Stringer found Tylor more sympathetic than most of his contemporaries. Tylor saw no difference in intellect between so-called savage people and Westerners.

  Later critics gave Tylor's approach the name old animism. They charged it with assuming that animists could not tell persons from things. They also accused it of preserving "colonialist and dualistic worldviews and rhetoric." The archaeologist Timothy Insoll rejected the whole picture of one universal primitive religion as unsophisticated and erroneous, because "it removes complexity, a precondition of religion now, in all its variants."

  Tylor's formula was close to one already offered by Auguste Comte under the name fetishism, though the two terms now mean different things.

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• 3. Totem Or Spirit

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  Tylor's definition arrived in the middle of a wider quarrel. Lawyers, theologians and philologists were all arguing about the nature of so-called primitive society, and that argument helped define a new science, anthropology. By the end of the 19th century an orthodoxy had formed, although few anthropologists would still accept it today.

  In 1869 the Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLennan proposed that animistic thinking in fetishism had produced a religion he named totemism. In his view, primitive people believed they descended from the same species as their totemic animal.

  The armchair anthropologists who followed, among them J. J. Bachofen, Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, argued about totemism rather than animism. Few challenged Tylor directly. As rich new ethnographies appeared, many anthropologists simply avoided the issue and even the word.

  Tim Ingold draws the line between the two ideas by focus. Animism centers on individual spirit beings who help keep life going. Totemism more often points to a single source of life, such as the land itself or the ancestors. Ingold places the Aboriginal Australians nearer the totemic side and the Inuit nearer the animistic side.

  Pantheism is another neighbor that is often confused with animism. Pantheists see one shared spiritual essence in everything. Animists stress the uniqueness of each individual soul, though some religions are both. The philosopher Giordano Bruno shows the overlap, since he equated the world soul with God and so held a pantheistic animism.

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• 4. Persons Not Things

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  Many anthropologists eventually stopped using the word, finding it too close to early theory and religious polemic. But Indigenous communities and nature worshippers had claimed it for themselves, and some openly called themselves animists. Scholars brought the term back with a new emphasis on how to behave toward other beings, some of them not human. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey judged it "of considerable value as a critical, academic term for a style of religious and cultural relating to the world."

  The new animism grew largely from the work of Irving Hallowell, who studied Ojibwe communities in Canada in the mid-20th century. For the Ojibwe he met, a person did not have to look human. Humans were simply persons among other persons, and those included rock persons and bear persons. Each was a willful being. Through respectful dealings with others, a person learned to "act as a person."

  Hallowell urged Western scholars to question their own modernist idea of what a person is. His approach shaped Nurit Bird-David, whose 1999 article reassessing animism drew seven published comments from other academics. She called animism a "relational epistemology" instead of a failure of primitive reasoning. In her account, an animist's identity rests on relationships, and people are bundles of social ties, or "dividuals", some of which join them to non-human "superpersons".

  Stewart Guthrie attacked this stance. He feared it implied that "the world is in large measure whatever our local imagination makes it." That, he felt, would lead anthropology to abandon "the scientific project."

  Tim Ingold backs Bird-David, writing that hunter-gatherers do not treat their surroundings as an external world of nature to be grasped intellectually. The anthropologist Rane Willerslev adds that an animist hunter knows he is a human hunter. Through mimicry, though, he can take on the viewpoint and senses of his prey. Willerslev reads shamanism in this light, as an everyday effort to influence the spirits of ancestors and animals by mirroring their behavior.

  Harvey's own definition, set out in his Handbook of Contemporary Animism in 2013, ties the idea to the philosopher Martin Buber. Buber contrasted an "I-thou" relation with an "I-it" relation. For Harvey the animist meets objects and animals as a "thou" and never as an "it".

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• 5. Practices Of Respect

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  In 1996 the Conne River Mi'kmaq held a powwow, and an eagle flew in circles over the central drum group. The gathered people called out kitpu, the word for eagle, to welcome the bird and to voice their pleasure at its beauty. Afterward they said the eagle's flight showed its approval of the event and of the Mi'kmaq return to traditional spiritual practice. Harvey cites the moment as an animist reading of animal behavior.

  In the Arctic, hunters perform rituals before a hunt to show respect to the spirits of animals. More generally, indigenous peoples use ritual to keep relations with spirits healthy, appease them and request help in hunting and healing. Animals are seen as acting with intention and purpose, and as persons who communicate. They take part in kinship systems and ceremonies, both alongside humans and in systems of their own.

  Among Māori communities in New Zealand, people often offer karakia invocations to sweet potatoes as they dig them up. The practice rests on kinship, since people and sweet potatoes are understood to have reached Aotearoa together in the same canoes. Art follows similar rules. Carving wood or stone does violence to the wood or stone person, who must be placated. Offcuts go back to the land, and the finished work is treated with special respect.

  The Ojibwe generally regarded stones as inanimate, with two exceptions described by Harvey. One was the Bell Rocks. The other was stones lying beneath trees that lightning had struck, which had become Thunderers themselves. Storms were persons called Thunderers, whose sounds carried messages and who fought a seasonal conflict over lakes and forests, hurling lightning at lake monsters. Wind could be a person too, and so could certain places.

  The shaman is a figure who moves between worlds. Mircea Eliade described shamans as messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds, who enter a trance, divine and heal by mending the soul. David Abram, drawing on his own fieldwork in Indonesia, Nepal and the Americas, offers a more ecological view. He sees the shaman as a go-between linking the human community with local animals, plants and landforms, each felt to have its own sentience. Healing, he suggests, is a byproduct of keeping that exchange in balance.

  Some modern Pagans cultivate bonds with particular trees, believing the trees offer knowledge or gifts such as flowers, sap or wood for firewood or a wand. In return the Pagans give offerings of mead or ale, a drop of blood from a finger, or a strand of wool.

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• 6. Traditions Worldwide

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  Most religious traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa are described as complex forms of animism, mixed with polytheism, shamanism and ancestor worship. In West Africa, the Serer religion known as A ƭat Roog honors ancestors, whom it venerates rather than worships. These ancestral spirits, the Pangool, serve as go-betweens linking the living to the divine figure Roog. In East Africa, the Kerma culture shows animistic traits, including animal amulets and prized lion antiquities, and the Kermans likely treated the mesa of Jebel Barkal as sacred. The traditional Berber religion in North Africa has animist strands too.

  China's Shang dynasty religion, practiced from 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE, was built on spiritualizing natural phenomena. In Japan, Shinto places supernatural beings called kami in natural forces and well-known places. They are worshipped at household kamidana, at family shrines and at public jinja. The Ryukyuan religion of the Ryukyu Islands is distinct from Shinto but shares similar traits. In Korea, Muism recognizes deities called kwisin, who can cause trouble if humans fail to honor them.

  In the Philippines, animism rests on belief in Anito, Diwata and Bathala. Anito are wooden statues and ancestor spirits, served by shamans called babaylan, who may be female or feminized men. The word Diwata, rooted in the Sanskrit devata, covers gods, fairies, nature spirits and celestial beings. Bathala, drawn from the Sanskrit bhattara, is the supreme deity, who presides over the Anito. Anito are invoked first and receive offerings first, whichever deity the worshipper wants to reach.

  In Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, animistic reverence for nature and ecological care sit inside the core of belief. The Hindu text Matsya Purana states: "A pond equals ten wells, a reservoir equals ten ponds, while a son equals ten reservoirs, and a tree equals ten sons." The banyan is holy in several Indian traditions, and the Ficus benghalensis is India's national tree. During Vat Purnima, married women in North India, Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat fast, tie threads around a banyan and pray for their husbands. A banyan called Thimmamma Marrimanu, with branches spread over five acres, entered the Guinness World Records in 1989 as the largest in the world.

  In Hinduism the banyan leaf is said to be the resting place of Krishna, who describes in the Bhagavat Gita a tree with its roots above and its branches below. Buddhism's Pali canon uses the banyan, called nigrodha, as a metaphor for sensual desire overcoming a person like a banyan supplanting its host tree. Panchavati are sacred groves of five trees, chosen from species such as the Vata banyan, the Ashvattha peepal and the Nimba neem.

  Among the Lepcha, the traditional religion is Mun. Among the Meitei of Northeast India, Sanamahism is named for the deity Lainingthou Sanamahi. In pre-Islamic Arabia, belief in jinn hardly fits animism in the strict sense. Jinn live lives like those of humans, yet they are neither human souls nor spirits of the dead.

  The Kalash of the Chitral District in northern Pakistan practice an ancient faith that authors describe as animistic. They are Pakistan's smallest ethnoreligious group. In the mid-20th century an attempt to force a few Kalasha villages to convert to Islam failed once official pressure lifted. They were first recorded in 1339, during Timur's invasions. Their folk songs name a southern homeland called Tsiyam.

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• 7. Pagan And Christian Echoes

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  The historian Ronald Hutton describes nature in the religions of the ancient Celts, Norse, Greeks, Romans and Slavs as "alive and participatory". These peoples built organized pantheons, yet rivers, trees, mountains and celestial bodies were often linked to particular deities. Offerings at springs, sacred groves and respect for local land spirits show animistic thinking inside polytheistic systems.

  When Christianity and other monotheistic faiths spread across Europe, many such practices were suppressed or reinterpreted. Rural folk religion kept some alive, including veneration of household spirits and seasonal festivals tied to the farming year. Certain wells and springs once linked to local deities came to be linked with Christian saints.

  The 19th and 20th centuries brought renewed interest in pre-Christian religion, shaped by Romanticism, antiquarian studies and rising national identities. That interest prepared the ground for Wicca, Druidry and Heathenry. Graham Harvey observes that modern Pagan worldviews stress relationship and agency in nature. In Wiccan ritual, earth, air, fire and water are invoked as active forces and not merely as symbols. The British Druid Emma Restall Orr argues that animism supplies a basis for environmental ethics. Sabina Magliocco has documented animistic themes in American Neo-Pagan rituals and festivals.

  Animists also live outside tribal societies. The author Daniel Quinn and the sculptor Lawson Oyekan count among them, as do many neopagans, including Eco-pagans.

  The Old Testament and Wisdom literature teach the omnipresence of God, in passages such as Jeremiah 23:24, Proverbs 15:3 and 1 Kings 8:27. The Gospel of John 1:14 says God was bodily present in the incarnation of his Son. One commentator even calls animism the home ground of Christian identity, its axis mundi. The Christian spiritual mapping movement works from a similar picture of an active spirit world. It researches the history of an area to identify a territorial demon, which prayer is meant to defeat. A common contrast is drawn: "The animist believes that rituals and objects contain spiritual power, whereas a Christian believes that rituals and objects may convey power." The theologian Mark I. Wallace argues for an animistic Christianity in which God is present in animals, trees and rocks.

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• 8. Minds And Machines

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  Jean Piaget, studying child development, suggested that children are born with an animist worldview and later grow out of it. Margaret Mead drew the opposite conclusion from her ethnographic research. She believed that children are not born with such beliefs but absorb them as their society educates them.

  Stewart Guthrie preferred the word attribution. He saw animism as an evolutionary strategy in which humans and other animals treat inanimate objects as possibly alive, so as to stay on guard against threats. In 2000 he called the attribution of spirits to natural phenomena such as stones and trees the most widespread concept of animism. His theory did not explain why the belief became central to religion.

  In 1911 William McDougall defended animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism. The physicist Nick Herbert later proposed "quantum animism", in which consciousness belongs to the physical world at every level. Werner Krieglstein noted that Herbert avoids the dualist picture of a ghost in the machine. In Error and Loss: A Licence to Enchantment, published in 2018, Ashley Curtis argues that human reason fits an evolutionary niche as echolocation does for bats and infrared vision does for pit vipers.

  Drawing on Bruno Latour, some postmodern anthropologists propose that every society still animates the world around it. People form personal bonds with pets, cars and teddy bears, treating them as communicative subjects and not as inert objects. On this view modern animism is not a leftover of primitive thought.

  In his books The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, David Abram goes further and builds an animistic account of reason itself. He points to reading. As soon as someone looks at letters on a page or screen, they can "see what it says", so the letters speak much as nature spoke to people before writing. Reading, he suggests, is an intensely concentrated form of animism.

  Harvey argues that animism poses a radical challenge to modernity, because it grants intelligence, language and desire to non-humans. It also questions the human uniqueness assumed by Abrahamic religions and Western rationalism. Animist outlooks have been found in the novels of Ursula Le Guin and Chinua Achebe, and in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.

  In his 1992 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, the historian Jack D. Forbes treated the animism of native and folk religions as "life-ism". He asked for exactly that, "more respect for all forms of life."

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