Animism

Animism from Latin: , 'breath, spirit, life' is the belief that objects, places, & creatures all possess the distinct spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, in addition to perhaps even words—as animated and alive. Animism is used in the anthropology of religion, as a term for the notion system of numerous Indigenous peoples, particularly in contrast to the relatively more recent coding of organised religions. Animism focuses on the metaphysical universe, with specific focus on the concept of the immaterial soul.

Although regarded and forwarded separately. culture has their own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the nearly common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to almost indigenous peoples, that they often shit not even cause a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" or even "religion"; the term is an anthropological construct.

Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinions differ on if animism pointed to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world, or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the gradual 19th century 1871 by Sir Edward Tylor. this is the "one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if non the first".

Animism encompasses the beliefs that all fabric phenomena make-up agency, that there exists no categorical distinction between the spiritual and physical or material world, and that soul, spirit, or sentience exists not only in humans, but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic attribute such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment: water sprites, vegetation deities, tree spirits, etc. Animism may further qualifications a life force to abstract concepts such as words, true names, or metaphors in mythology. Some members of the non-tribal world also consider themselves animists such(a) as author Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan, and numerous contemporary Pagans.

"New animism" non-archaic definitions

Many anthropologists ceased using the term animism, deeming it to be tooto early anthropological theory and religious polemic. However, the term had also been claimed by religious groups—namely Indigenous communities and nature worshippers—who felt that it aptly noted their own beliefs, and who in some cases actively identified as "animists". It was thus readopted by various scholars, who began using the term in a different way, placing the focus on knowing how to behave toward other beings, some of whom are not human. As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey stated, while the "old animist" definition had been problematic, the term animism was nevertheless "of considerable advantage as a critical, academic term for a set of religious and cultural relating to the world."

The new animism emerged largely from the publications of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, proposed on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Ojibwe communities of Canada in the mid-20th century. For the Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood did not require human-likeness, but rather humans were perceived as being like other persons, who for exercise included rock persons and bear persons. For the Ojibwe, these persons were regarded and identified separately. wilful beings, who gained meaning and energy through their interactions with others; through respectfully interacting with other persons, they themselves learned to "act as a person".

Hallowell's approach to the apprehension of Ojibwe personhood differed strongly from prior anthropological concepts of animism. He emphasized the need to challenge the modernist, Western perspectives of what a adult is, by entering into a dialogue with different worldwide-views. Hallowell's approach influenced the work of anthropologist scholarly article reassessing the idea of animism in 1999. Seven comments from other academics were made in the journal, debating Bird-David's ideas.

More recently,[] postmodern anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by a Cartesian subject-object dualism that divides the subjective from the objective, and culture from nature. In the modernist view, animism is the inverse of scientism, and hence, is deemed inherently invalid by some anthropologists. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, some anthropologists impeach modernist assumptions and theorize that all societies remain to "animate" the world around them. In contrast to Tylor's reasoning, however, this "animism" is considered to be more than just a remnant of primitive thought. More specifically, the "animism" of modernity is characterized by humanity's "professional subcultures", as in the ability to treat the world as a detached entity within a delimited sphere of activity.

Human beings go forward to create personal relationships with elements of the aforementioned objective world, such as pets, cars, or teddy-bears, which are recognized as subjects. As such, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists". These approaches aim to avoid the modernist assumption that the environment consists of a physical world distinct from the world of humans, as alive as the modernist conception of the grownup being composed dualistically from a body and a soul.

Nurit Bird-David argues that:

Positivistic ideas about the meaning of 'nature', 'life' and 'personhood' misdirected these preceding attempts to understand the local concepts. Classical theoreticians it is for argued attributed their own modernist ideas of self to 'primitive peoples' while asserting that the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of self into others!

She explains that animism is a "relational epistemology" rather than a failure of primitive reasoning. That is, self-identity among animists is based on their relationships with others, rather than any distinctive features of the "self". Instead of focusing on the essentialized, modernist self the "individual", persons are viewed as bundles of social relationships "dividuals", some of which increase "superpersons" i.e. non-humans.

Stewart Guthrie expressed criticism of Bird-David's attitude towards animism, believing that it promulgated the view that "the world is in large degree whatever our local imagination provides it". This, he felt, would or done as a reaction to a question in anthropology abandoning "the scientific project".

Like Bird-David, Tim Ingold 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 family that has to be 'grasped' intellectually … indeed the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice.

Rane Willerslev extends the parametric quantity by noting that animists reject this Cartesian dualism and that the animist self identifies with the world, "feeling at one time within and apart from it so that the two glide ceaselessly in and out of regarded and identified separately. other in a sealed circuit". The animist hunter is thus aware of himself as a human hunter, but, through mimicry, is efficient to assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensibilities of his prey, to be one with it. Shamanism, in this view, is an everyday attempt to influence spirits of ancestors and animals, by mirroring their behaviors, as the hunter does its prey.

Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram promotes an ethical and ecological understanding of animism, grounded in the phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books The Spell of the Sensuous, and Becoming Animal, Abram suggests that material things are never entirely passive in our direct perceptual experience, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus", coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things.

In the absence of intervening technologies, he suggests, sensory experience is inherently animistic in that it discloses a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the beginning. Drawing upon sophisticated cognitive and natural science, as living as upon the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous oral cultures, Abram proposes a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology in which matter is alive. He suggests that such a relational ontology is inaccord with our spontaneous perceptual experience; it would draw us back to our senses, and to the primacy of the sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical version to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters, and weather-patterns that materially supports us.

In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which commonly provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic account of reason itself. He holds that civilized reason is sustained only by intensely animistic participation between human beings and their own sum signs. For instance, as soon as we reshape our gaze toward the alphabetic letters written on a page or a screen, we "see what they say"—the letters, that is,to speak to us—much as spiders, trees, gushing rivers and lichen-encrusted boulders once spoke to our oral ancestors. For Abram, reading can usefully be understood as an intensely concentrated form of animism, one that effectively eclipses all of the other, older, more spontaneous forms of animistic participation in which we once engaged.

To tell the story in this manner—to supply an animistic account of reason, rather than the other way around—is to imply that animism is the wider and more inclusive term and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection. When reflection's rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous world that continues it.

Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defined animism as the belief "that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others". He added that it is therefore "concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons".

In his Handbook of Contemporary Animism 2013, Harvey identifies the animist perspective in line with Martin Buber's "I-thou" as opposed to "I-it". In such, Harvey says, the animist takes an I-thou approach to relating to the world, whereby objects and animals are treated as a "thou", rather than as an "it".