Part of a series on
Anthropology of religion
Social and cultural anthropology


Animism is used in the

  • Animism, Rinri, Modernization; the Base of Japanese Robotics
  • Urban Legends Reference Pages: Weight of the Soul[1]
  • Animist Network

External links

  • Quinn, Daniel. The Story of B

Further reading

  • "Animism". The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2001–07. . Inc. (10 July 2008)
  • Bird-David, Nurit. 1991. "Animism Revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology", Current Anthropology 40, pp. 67–91. Reprinted in Graham Harvey (ed.) 2002. Readings in Indigenous Religions (London and New York: Continuum) pp. 72–105.
  • Dean, Bartholomew 2009 Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia, Gainesville: University Press of Florida ISBN 978-0-8130-3378-5. (Online)
  • .
  • .


  1. ^ a b c EB (1878).
  2. ^ Segal, p. 14.
  3. ^ a b
  4. ^
  5. ^
  6. ^
  7. ^
  8. ^
  9. ^
  10. ^
  11. ^
  12. ^
  13. ^ a b
  14. ^
  15. ^ a b c
  17. ^
  18. ^
  19. ^
  20. ^
  21. ^
  22. ^
  23. ^
  24. ^ Harvey (2006), p. 6.
  25. ^
  26. ^
  28. ^
  29. ^ Fernandez-Armesto, p. 138.
  30. ^ Oxford Dictionary Online.
  32. ^ Paul A. Harrison Elements of Pantheism 2004, p. 11
  34. ^
  35. ^
  36. ^
  39. ^ Nick Herbert Holistic Physics – or – An Introduction to Quantum Tantra 2002, retrieved on 2014-05-01 from


See also


Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his quantum Animism:




Science and animism

Animism in the broadest sense, i.e., thinking of objects as animate, and treating them as if they were animate, is near-universal. Jean Piaget applied the term in reference to an implicit understanding of the world in a child's mind which assumes that all events are the product of intention or consciousness. Piaget explains this with a cognitive inability to distinguish the external world from one's internal world.

Psychology and animism

Other usages

  • Traditional African and Afro-American religions are animistic.
  • Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, is highly animistic. In Shinto, spirits of nature, or kami, are believed to exist everywhere, from the major (such as the goddess of the sun), which can be considered polytheistic, to the minor, which are more likely to be seen as a form of Animism.
  • Some Hindu groups are considered animist. The coastal Karnataka has a different tradition of praying to spirits (see also Folk Hinduism). Likewise a popular Hindu ritual form of worship of North Malabar in Kerala, India is the Tabuh Rah blood offering to Theyyam gods, despite being forbidden in the Vedic philosophy of sattvic Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, Theyyam deities are propitiated through the cock sacrifice where the religious cockfight is a religious exercise of offering blood to the Theyyam gods.
  • Many traditional beliefs in the Philippines still practised to an extent today are animist and spiritist in origin in that there are rituals aimed at pacifying malevolent spirits or are apotropaic in nature.
  • People in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei to a certain degree, still practices animism although the majority of them are Muslims. Animistic beliefs were adapted into Islamic practices as people were not keen in abandoning the culture they have been practising for thousands of years. This includes the belief in ghosts, black magic, and tree/forest spirits e.g. Orang Bunian.
  • Mun, (also called Munism or Bongthingism) is the traditional polytheistic, animist, shamanistic, and syncretic religion of the Lepcha people.[34][35][36]
  • Many traditional Native American religions are fundamentally animistic. See, for example, the Lakota Sioux prayer Mitakuye Oyasin. The Haudenausaunee Thanksgiving Address, which can take an hour to recite, directs thanks towards every being - plant, animal and other.
  • The New Age movement commonly demonstrates animistic traits in asserting the existence of nature spirits.[37]


Animism is not the same as pantheism, although the two are sometimes confused. Some religions are both pantheistic and animistic. One of the main differences is that while animists believe everything to be spiritual in nature, they do not necessarily see the spiritual nature of everything in existence as being united (monism), the way pantheists do. As a result, animism puts more emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual soul. In pantheism, everything shares the same spiritual essence, rather than having distinct spirits and/or souls.[32][33] Additionally, Pantheism posits a source of this "monism". This source may or may not have agency. In contrast, in Animism, the soul or essence or spirit of objects and living things are novel and separate from the whole, while still seen as irrevocably intertwined with one another in a community.

Distinction from pantheism



Many animistic cultures observe some form of ancestor reverence. Whether they see the ancestors as living in an other world, or embodied in the natural features of this world, animists often believe that offerings and prayers to and for the dead are an important facet of maintaining harmony with the world of the spirits.

Ancestor reverence


In many animistic world views, the human being is often regarded as on a roughly equal footing with other animals, plants, and natural forces.[29] Therefore, it is morally imperative to treat these agents with respect. In this world view, humans are considered a part of nature, rather than superior to, or separate from it.


Tylor argued that Animism consisted of two unformulated propositions; all parts of nature had a soul, and these souls are capable of moving without requiring a physical form. This gives rise to fetishism, the worship of visible objects as powerful, spiritual beings. The second proposition was that souls are independent of their physical forms. It gives rise to 'spiritism', the worship of the souls of the dead and the unseen spirits of the heavens. Others such as Nurit Bird-David, associate Animism with various aspects of shamanism.


There is ongoing disagreement (and no general consensus) as to whether animism is merely a singular, broadly encompassing religious belief[22][23] or a worldview in and of itself, comprising many diverse mythologies found worldwide in many diverse cultures.[24][25] This also raises a controversy regarding the ethical claims animism may or may not make: whether animism ignores questions of ethics altogether[26] or, by endowing various non-human elements of nature with spirituality or personhood,[27] in fact promotes a complex ecological ethics.[28] In modern usage, the term is sometimes used improperly as a catch-all classification of "other world religions" alongside major organized religions.




Tim Ingold, like Bird-David, argues that animists do not see themselves as separate from their environment: "Hunter-gatherers do not, as a rule, approach their environment as an external world of nature that has to be 'grasped' intellectually ... indeed the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice."[18] Willerslev extends the argument by noting that animists reject this Cartesian dualism, and that the animist self identifies with the world, "feeling at once within and apart from it so that the two glide ceaselessly in and out of each other in a sealed circuit."[19] The animist hunter is thus aware of himself as a human hunter, but, through mimicry is able to assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensibilities of his prey, to be one with it.[20] Shamanism, in this view, is an everyday attempt to influence spirits of ancestors and animals by mirroring their behaviours as the hunter does his prey.



Animism as a relational ontology


In 1869 (three years after Tylor proposed his definition of animism), the Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLellan argued that the animistic thinking evident in fetishism gave rise to a religion he named Totemism. Primitive people believed, he argued, that they were descended of the same species as their totemic animal.[13] Subsequent debate by the armchair anthropologists (including J. J. Bachofen, Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud) remained focused on totemism rather than animism, with few directly challenging Tylor's definition. Indeed, anthropologists "have commonly avoided the issue of Animism and even the term itself rather than revisit this prevalent notion in light of their new and rich ethnographies."[15]

Tylor's definition of animism was a part of a growing international debate on the nature of 'primitive society' by lawyers, theologians and philologists. The debate defined the field of research of a new science, anthropology. By the end of the nineteenth century an orthodoxy on 'primitive society' had emerged although few anthropologists today would accept their definition; the 'nineteenth century armchair anthropologists' argued 'primitive society' (an evolutionary category) was ordered by kinship and was divided into exogamous descent groups related by a series of marriage exchanges. Their religion was animism, the belief that natural species and objects had souls. With the development of private property, these descent groups were displaced by the emergence of the territorial state. These rituals and beliefs eventually evolved over time into the vast array of "developed" religions. According to Tylor, the more scientifically advanced a society became, the less members of that society believed in animism; however, any remnant ideologies of souls or spirits, to Tylor, represented "survivals" of the original animism of early humanity.[14]

Social evolutionist conceptions

As a self-proclaimed "confirmed scientific rationalist", Tylor believed that animistic beliefs were "childish" and typical of "cognitive underdevelopment", and that it was therefore common in "primitive" peoples such as those living in hunter gatherer societies. In fact, Tylor based his theory of animism on his experience of modern seances thereby constructing a model of 'primitive thought' (of which he had no first hand experience) from his first-hand knowledge of spiritualism. Stringer notes that his reading of Primitive Culture led him to believe that Tylor was far more sympathetic in regard to “primitive” populations than many of his contemporaries and that Tylor expressed no belief that there was any difference between the intellectual capabilities of “savage” people and westerners.[3] To Tylor, the fundamental distinction between western and “primitive” cultures was education. Education was a social-cultural evolutionary process that produced differing levels of sophistication (“progress”) in different places.

The term was repurposed by the anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor in his 1871 book Primitive Culture,[1] in which he defined it as "the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general." According to Tylor, animism often includes "an idea of pervading life and will in nature";[12] i.e., a belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. This formulation was little different from that proposed by Auguste Comte as "fetishism",[13] although the terms now have distinct uses.

The term "animism" appears to have been first developed (originally c. 1720 as animismus) by the biological theory that souls formed the vital principle and that the normal phenomena of life and the abnormal phenomena of disease could be traced to spiritual causes.[1] The earliest known usage in English appeared in 1819.[11]

Sir Edward Tylor was responsible for forming the definition of Animism currently accepted in anthropology.

Tylor's definition

Theories of animism


  • Theories of animism 1
    • Tylor's definition 1.1
    • Social evolutionist conceptions 1.2
    • Animism as a relational ontology 1.3
  • Religion 2
    • Characteristics 2.1
      • Fetishism/totemism 2.1.1
      • Ancestor reverence 2.1.2
      • Shamanism 2.1.3
    • Distinction from pantheism 2.2
    • Examples 2.3
  • Other usages 3
    • Psychology and animism 3.1
    • Science and animism 3.2
  • See also 4
  • References 5
    • Bibliography 5.1
  • Further reading 6
  • External links 7



. anthropological construct the term is an [8] Although each culture has its own different mythologies and rituals, "animism" is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The Animistic perspective is so fundamental, mundane, everyday and taken-for-granted that most animistic indigenous people do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion");[7]
