animismreligions and, as a result of being discovered by Christian missionaries,
is negatively associated with the history of Western colonialism, being
considered something strange and inferior when compared to Christianity.
In 1708, Georg Stahl, a German physician and chemist, theorizes that a
physical element, which he identifies as anima, vitalizes living bodies. In
his A Natural History of Religion published in 1757, philosopher David
Hume observes that humans attribute to the world around them signs of
human likeness, which he thinks is absurd, vulgar, and ignorant. After
these thinkers pass from the scene, animism plays an important theoreti-
cal role in the quest for the origin of religion.
Under the influence of Darwinian thought and the search for the ori-
gins of religion, James Frazer (1854–1914), an earlier theorist of religion,
calls attention to a tendency among indigenous people to claim that their
plants possess souls, which he views as evidence of religious evolution
that develops into polytheism. In 1871, Edward Tylor, an early anthro-
pologist, adopts Stahl’s term animism to characterize the essence of reli-
gion. Tylor argues that animism is not only an identifying feature of
primitive religions, but also a ubiquitous religious concept. Tylor thinks
that animism forms the foundation for the belief in higher spiritual
beings. By attributing souls to inanimate objects of nature, indigenous
people are making an erroneous attribution. Tylor is convinced that
aspects of animism survive in contemporary religion, such as the belief
in human souls or ghosts.
With the rejection of evolutionary schemes for the development of
religion, the search for the origin of religion, and the aftermath of colo-
nialism, the concept of animism falls out of favor as a hermeneutical
concept for indigenous religions. The revival of the concept is associated
with the lack of an adequate term to replace it. During his fieldwork with
the Native American Ojibwa in Manitoba, Canada, Hallowell discovers
that the natives believe that rocks are animate to the extent that some
rocks and weather systems are conceived to be persons. It is believed by
the Ojibwa that stones can speak, and weather phenomenon, such as
thunder, is imagined to be birds that can demonstrate either affection or
hostility. Hallowell also discovers that animism among the Ojibwa is
restrictive in the sense that not everything is experienced as living.
Animism is closely related to totemism, although they should be dis-
tinguished. The latter uses natural images, whereas the former uses soci-
ological representations to construct order in nature. Therefore, totemic
belief systems model society after nature, whereas animism constructs
nature after society.
Further reading: Hallowell (1975); Harvey (2006); Stringer (1999); Tylor (1871)