Animism

Animism (from the Latin: animus, or anima, meaning mind or soul) refers to a belief in numerous personalized, supernatural beings endowed with reason, intelligence and/or volition that inhabit both objects and living beings and govern their existences. More simply, it is the belief that "everything is conscious" or that "everything has a soul." The term has been further extended to refer to a belief that the natural world is a community of living personas, only some of whom are human. As a term, "animism" has also been used in academic circles to refer to the types of cultures in which these animists live, including the wider community of "persons" (whether they be human, rock, plant, animal, bird, ancestral) with whom they live.

While the term "animism" refers to a broad range of spiritual beliefs (many of which are still extant within human cultures today), it does not denote any particular religious creed or doctrine. The most common feature of animist religions is their attention to particulars, as evidenced by the number and variety of spirits they recognize. This can be strongly contrasted with the all-inclusive universalism of monotheistic, pantheistic and panentheistic traditions. Furthermore, animist spirituality is focused more on addressing practical exigencies (such as health, nourishment and safety needs) than solving abstract metaphysical quandaries.

Animism as a Category of Religion

The term "Animism" was first introduced to academic discourse by anthropologist, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his 1871 book, Primitive Culture. Tylor used the term to refer specifically to belief in spirits, that is, the belief in any entity described as having a mystical, supernatural, or non-empirical nature. Animist thought, Tylor proposed, was religion in its most inchoate form and served simply as a starting point for human religious development. That is, so-called "primitive" cultures such as the remaining hunter-gatherers upheld this superstitious belief that everything had a soul, reflecting their supposedly low level of technological development. Originally, these non-Western societies relied on animism to explain the occurence of certain events and processes. However, as technological thought progressed, so too did explanations for events in the physical world. As societies advanced from savagery to stages of barbarism and eventually modern civilization, Tylor believed that they subsequently inherited more complex beliefs, such as polydaemonism or polytheism and eventually the supposed pinnacles of religious thought, monotheism or else atheism. At the time that Tylor wrote, this theory was politically radical because it made the claim that non-Western peoples (that is, non-Christian "heathens") do in fact have religion. Tylor's use of the term animism was indubitably pejorative, referring to what he conceived as an inferior form of religion, and this usage has since been widely rejected along with his overall theory of religious evolution. The theory reflected, at best, an attempt to make societal development consonant with the development of species theorized by Charles Darwin. Today the term animism is used with more respect and sensitivity to the obvious viability of tribal peoples and their spiritual beliefs. It is now commonly accepted that religious beliefs function emotionally and socially, rather than purely for the purpose of intellectual explanation, illustrative of the greater problem created out of Tylor's imposition of a Western view of religion upon the tribal peoples he studied.

Many thinkers do not categorize animism as a form of religion at all. They argue that animism is in the first instance an explanation of phenomena rather than an attitude of mind toward the cause of those phenomena. Thus, animistic thought is more philosoph