The term “animism” was once a common way of describing religions across the world that include a community of humans and nature-spirits, but the term fell out of favour as anthropologists, folklorists and religious studies scholars re-evaluated the way they discussed other cultures. Recently, the term has been rehabilitated. Dr Orton explores the debate…
For university-level scholars or independent researchers, we’ve included clickable links to useful literature and canonical scholarship you need to be acquainted with to get started. For anyone interested in anthropology and folklore, enjoy these fascinating examples from the field!
Animism is a belief that natural phenomena such as rocks or trees have a spirit; these things, along with non-human animals, are considered to be people. Historically, the accepted definition of animism came from the nineteenth-century work of Edward Tylor. However, Tylor’s work was discredited by later scholars because of his dismissive attitude towards the people he was studying.
Tylor argued that people of animistic societies were like children who attribute living qualities to inanimate objects. Tylor also assumed that what he called “primitive peoples” think natural objects have a “self” in the same way that humans do.
As a result, the term “animism” was dropped due to being seen to denote outdated ideas of Western superiority, but it has recently returned to respectability in academia. Unlike earlier uses of the term, New Animism does not seek to categorise animism as a “false belief.”
The New Animism
It is useful to think about animism in the way that Nurit Bird-David, suggests: as a “relational epistemology” that seeks to understand the world through relationships between human and non-human persons.
This, says Bird-David, avoids the modernist dichotomies of natural/supernatural and spirit/body. As I’ve argued in previous posts, these dichotomies are not uniformly accepted in Western thought, particularly Descartes’ dualist view, which New Animist scholars argue is so pervasive - but I do take Bird-David’s point that this can be a useful way to look at animism.
Graham Harvey points out that English speakers are preconditioned to equate the word ‘person’ with human, but “Animists live in a different world: a community of persons all of whom are capable of relationship, communication, agency and desire.”
Speaking of the Mi’kmaq people at the Conne river powwow, Harvey points out that fires are relational beings; their receipt of ‘food’ leads to the reciprocal gift to humans of light and heat. In this context, “feeding the fire” is not just a metaphor – the fire is understood to desire and be grateful for offerings.
Philippe Descola distinguishes between (broadly Western) “naturalism”, “the coexistence between a single unifying nature and a multiplicity of cultures” and “animism,” in which humans and non-humans are seen as possessing identical souls and different bodies. Descola says that “animism holds” that “humans and all the kinds of non-humans with whom humans interact have each a different kind of physicality in that their identical internal essences are lodged in different types of bodies, which are often described locally as clothing that can be donned or discarded.”
Naturalism, on the other hand, “inverts the ontological premises of animism since, instead of claiming an identity of souls and a difference of bodies, it is predicated upon a discontinuity of interiorities and a material continuity. What, for us, distinguishes humans from non-humans is the mind, the soul, subjectivity, a moral conscience, language, and so forth.”
Descola says that animism makes no such distinction between humans and non-humans: Both human and non-human persons do have culture, animistic religions hold, but their physicality induces certain perspectives. Moreover, the fact that “animism” treats plants and animals as possessing a soul identical to that of humans, this opens the possibility of establishing human/non-human social relations. Metamorphosis, often through dreams, “offers an ingenious solution to the problem of the interaction on the same plane between human and non-human, initially possessing entirely different bodies.”
I have to object to Descola’s portrayal of Western thought here. As I’ve argued in previous posts, Western views of animals and nature are much more complex than Descola supposes.
Descola and scholars who follow him eschew theories of cultural relativism, as relativism implies that there are a variety of cultural worldviews against a single natural reality (“one world, but many worldviews”), as opposed to Descola’s account of animism, which conceives of one kind of soul manifested through different bodies.
A similar approach can be found in the earlier work of Viveiros de Castro, who describes the understanding of Amazonian societies that conscious beings share the same culture or perspective, but that this differs depending on the type of body that is inhabited: “What to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; what to the souls of the dead is a rotting corpse, to us is soaking manioc; what we see as a muddy water hole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house.”
These ideas are connected with the Ontological Turn, which asks, “what kinds of things are there?” in a society’s cosmology, rather than asking, “are these beliefs true?” I find approaches like this helpful in thinking about how to do fieldwork in a way that respects local communities.
I don’t like some of the assumptions that these approaches make about Western theory. As I’ve explained in previous blog posts, ideas about “personhood” and the “self” are not straightforward and there is no consensus about these concepts in Western philosophy.
I also feel uncomfortable with the extent to which some New Animist scholars assume that the cosmologies of indigenous cultures share commonalities. My preference is for site-specific studies, which take into account the unique histories and experience of each community, as well as allowing us to listen to differing views within these communities.
Having said this, there has been some great work done by indigenous scholars themselves in this tradition. I’ve found the New Animism to be a fascinating and insightful way to think about communities who deserve to have their stories told - in a way that they themselves would recognise.
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