Concepts
The concept of animism first appeared explicitly in Victorian British anthropology in Primitive Culture (1871), by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (later published as Religion in Primitive Culture, 1958). “The doctrine of human and other souls” or “the doctrine of spiritual beings” constitutes the essence of Tylor’s theory.
The idea of animism is that in all cultural systems people experience phenomena—such as birth , death , sleep , dreams, visions, sudden insights, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and trances—that simultaneously conjoin perceptions of being “elsewhere” with the knowledge of being “here.” Some thinkers explain this experience through a belief in the human soul, which they envision as distinct from but inextricably attached to the body until death do they part, so that animistic belief in the soul becomes part of every cultural system.
Robert Ranulph Marett (The Threshold of Religion, 1909), Tylor’s successor at Oxford, introduced the concept of animatism to that of animism, extending the idea of an animating spirit similar to the soul to include many different forces in nature and culture. Such force is what makes a tree grow from a seed, the rain fall, or the sun shine—that which brings fertility and fecundity to the earth. Loss of such force results in death. People are in awe of such forces as manifest in volcanoes and earthquakes and especially in inert corpses. Out of the observations and awe of force in nature comes the universality of the sacral basis for religious experience, which Marett argued was prior to animism. Animism and animatism are often not clearly distinguished, as many of Marett’s ideas have been blended through time in philosophical and religious literature with those of Tylor and many others.
The Canelos Quichua native people of Amazonian Ecuador illustrate concepts of animism and animatism. Souls and spirits are ubiquitous and even spirits have souls. Those who interact intensively with the souls are the male shamans and the female potters, both of whom influence the conceptual system of one another through mutual symbol revelation. For example, when a shaman in trance dimly “sees” an approaching colorful, noisy spirit, a woman quietly, from the darkened recesses of the room, clarifies his emerging vision and names the actual spirit.
Human souls are acquired through both mother and father. Spirit essences are hierarchized into four essential tiers, easily represented as spheres encompassing one another. Sungui, the master spirit of the rain forest and hydrosphere, is the apotheosis of androgynous power. This male and female spirit takes many corporeal forms, the most prominent being the giant anaconda. This spiritual superpower must be controlled or it will overwhelm and inundate the world; Amasanga, master spirit of the rain forest, controls the power of Sungui. The corporeal representative of this androgynous being is the great black jaguar. In turn, rainforest dynamics are controlled by Nungüi, a strictly feminine spirit, master of garden soil and pottery clay, whose corporeality is manifest in the deadly black coral snake with a mouth too small to bite humans. The inner sphere is the human household, wherein the souls and spirits come together in a special system of human knowledge, vision, and imagery. Power flows downward through the spheres, and control of power is exercised upward from inner to outer spheres.
Cultural Implications
In Tylor’s original formulation, animism was an argument for the universality of human intellectual and spiritual worlds. The universality of concepts of souls, and hence the universality of religion, is a major contribution of Tylor, one that endures into the twenty-first century. Like the Canelos Quichua, humans everywhere, in one way or another, and with very great differences, conceptualize into cultural systems the spiritual dimensions of life, as well as the corporeal aspects of quotidian existence. With this concept of universalism of fundamental religious thought, Victorian England and the rest of the English-lettered world was exposed to cultural relativism.
What constitutes human difference in economy, society, psychology, and religion, then, is cultural, not biological. Although people are very “different” from one another, across space and through time, their mental capacities—cognitive, emotional, and imaginative—are not. As Clifford Geertz puts it: “The doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind, which so far as I am aware, is not seriously questioned by any reputable anthropologist, is but the direct contradictory of the primitive mentality argument” (p. 62).
Tylor, however, very much the Victorian gentleman, began his quest for the bases of animism with what he called the “lower races,” whom he also labeled “savages,” “rude, non-religious tribes,” and “tribes very low in the scale of humanity,” among other such figures of speech that link evolutionary biology and culture, thereby enforcing the “primitive mentality argument” later expanded by Lucien Lévi-Bruhl in Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910; translated in 1996 as How Natives Think ). The Victorian contradiction of enlightened cultural relativity, attached to a scalar view of humans as evolving from the “lower races” to the “civilized nations,” leads to the racist paradox that a few civilizations evolved while the rest of the world’s people “remained” animist. Animism, by this reasoning, is evidence of low-level “relics.” This contradiction became canonized by the sixteenth century through the emergence of Western modernity and mercantilist capitalism and remains strong in twenty-first-century Western cosmology.
It is, however, a fallacy. Every religious system, including the monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam, include representations of the supernatural with strong animistic dimensions. Despite religious scholars’ assertions to the contrary, members of monotheistic religions nonetheless act at times as though there are spiritual beings detached from corporeal beings, manifest concern over the fate of their immortal souls, and make these beliefs part of their traditions, such as the jinn of Middle Eastern folklore, or of the dominant religion itself.
Nonetheless, the enduring Victorian contradiction between cultural relativity and social evolution continues to cast a shadow over the religious beliefs of indigenous peoples, leading many of the world’s people with rich beliefs in spirits and noncorporeal essences of animate and inanimate things—but without a “high god” organizer—to resent the concept animist because of its connotation of savagery. Among the Canelos Quichua, for example, spokespeople to the outside world often express considerable resentment at the use of the word.
By the same token, animist symbolism does more than establish a template for understanding quotidian life and the universe. It also undergirds the ideological struggles of indigenous people to establish a place and space in nation-state life. In Amazonian Ecuador, for example, animistic concepts were utilized during political uprisings in 1990 and 1992, and again in 2000, when indigenous people rose up as one mighty body to claim—in part successfully—their territory and their rights. Animism as a concept is very powerful in its relativistic dimensions, but is destructive when used to place people in a universal or particular evolutionary scheme that ranges from primitive to civilized.