Idea Transcript
Reviving Animism: Contemporary Anthropological Thoughts on the Concept of Animism
“Animism” was once a very popular concept in the comparative study of religion. Its greatest early champion was E. B. Tylor, who also offered the so-called minimal definition of religion: “belief in spiritual beings.” Much of his famous 1871 Primitive Culture was dedicated to religion, and in that work he proposed animism as the original form of religion, which he understood as “the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general” or more specifically “an idea of pervading life and will in nature.” In other words, animism came to be seen as a (relatively primitive) notion that the natural world—animals, plants, objects, and even phenomena like wind and rain or sickness and death— possessed “animating” spirits or souls, with personal or mental qualities very much like humans.
The concept of animism fell into disrepute in the twentieth century, partly because it seemed too “intellectualist” for some users (that is, too much like the solution to an alleged puzzle or mystery in the minds of early humans) and partly because it seemed to promote a conventional Western/Christian dualism of “spirit” and “matter.” Third and perhaps most significantly, animism was presented as a mistake, the false attribution of mind to matter.
However, in recent decades animism has enjoyed a revival and rehabilitation. One reason is that animist thinking really does appear to characterize many cultures and religions. For instance A. Irving Hallowell noticed that the Ojibwa (Native American) language puts stones in the grammatical category of animate beings; recall from Chapter One of Introducing Anthropology of Religion that one informant insisted that some rocks were persons. Language was Hallowell’s first clue that the Ojibwa did not conceive of society, religion, and “the supernatural” in the same way that Western cultures do. Things that we believe are inanimate and impersonal, like trees, stones, the sun or moon, thunder, and material objects
like pots and pipes, were classified as animate in Ojibwa. Further, the Ojibwa treated and experienced those things like persons. For instance, people reported seeing stones move or hearing them speak, and people spoke to such objects in turn. They also referred to important objects in kin terms, especially as “grandfathers,” and these “other-than-human grandfathers are sources of power to human beings through the ‘blessings’ they bestow, i.e., a sharing of their power which enhances the ‘power’ of human beings” (1976: 360). Finally, their sacred stories or myths (ätíso’kanak) expressed a personal and social relationship between humans and other beings who “behave like people” (365). Thus, Hallowell concluded that much if not all of what we consider inanimate and impersonal, like the sun, was for the Ojibwa “not a natural object in our sense at all…. [T]he sun is a ‘person’ of the other-than-human class” (366). Ultimately, “any concept of impersonal ‘natural’ forces is totally foreign to Ojibwa thought” (367), since everything was personal and social; indeed, the Ojibwa had no notion “of impersonal forces as major determinants of events” (382), as all events including thunder and lightning were the actions of persons, and the Ojibwa were puzzled that white people did not think likewise. Most profoundly and importantly for the study of religion, even the key “religious” term manitu, allegedly the name of some spiritual being or power, did not “connote an impersonal, magical, or supernatural force” (382). Hallowell was compelled to concede that, just as they lacked a concept of “natural,” so they lacked a concept of “supernatural”: the understanding of objects and phenomena “as other-than-humans persons exemplifies a world view in which a natural-supernatural dichotomy has no place” (368). Instead, for the Ojibwa the world was a great social system of human persons and other-than-human persons, in which one set of social principles applied to all.
In more recent years, as discussed in the text, anthropologists like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, as well as scholars in other disciplines, have come increasingly to emphasize agency, that is the possession of “mind” or “will” or “intention.” From the perspective of agency, “spiritual beings” are effectively
“persons,” like humans yet unlike humans in interesting and consequential ways. However, for animism proper, two of the primary rehabilitators have been Nurit David-Bird and Graham Harvey.
In 1999 Bird-David published an influential essay literally titled “Animism Revisited,” arguing that, rather than “simple religion and a failed epistemology” (1999: S67), animism was a real and important form of relationship between humans and the non-human world. Working with the Nayaka people of southern India, she found that they talked about and interacted with a class of beings called devaru, which she characterized as “superpersons” and “dividual persons”—that is, persons who are not a single continuous body but who are emplaced in multiple physical sites simultaneously. In a word, she posited that devaru “are constitutive of sharing relationships reproduced by Nayaka with aspects of their environment. The devaru are objectifications of these relationships and make them known” (S68).
She suggested, for example, that a hill devaru objectifies Nayaka relationships with the hill; it makes known the relationships between Nayaka and that hill. Nayaka maintain social relationships with other beings because, as Tylor holds, they a priori consider them persons. As and when and because they engage in and maintain relationships with other beings, they constitute them as kinds of persons: they make them “relatives” by sharing with them and thus make them persons. They do not regard them as persons and subsequently some of them as relatives (S73).
For the Nayaka, the devaru are real, and they are real—and really persons—because humans relate to and interact with them, not vice versa. And Nayaka experience devaru because they “focus on events”: Their attention is educated to dwell on events. They are attentive to the changes of things in the world in relation to changes in themselves. As they move and act in the forest, they pick up information about the relative variances in the flux of the interrelatedness between themselves and other things against relative invariances. When they pick up a relatively changing think with their relatively changing selves—and, all the more, when it happens in a relatively unusual manner—they regard as devaru this particular thing within this particular situation (S74).
Devaru are, further, unique, each with its own personality. Nayaka people claimed to recognize each “by how it idiosyncratically interrelates with Nayaka (how it laughs with, talks with, gets angry at, responds to Nayaka, etc.). Sometimes, various devaru come together in a gang, evoked by the same performer, who then switches gestures, speech styles, dialects, and even languages from on sentence to the next” (S75). Finally, interaction and conversation with devaru “is highly personal, informal, and friendly, including joking, teasing, bargaining, etc. In its idiomatic structure it resembles the demand-sharing discourse which is characteristic of Nayaka and hunter-gatherers generally. With numerous repetitions or minor variations on a theme, Nayaka and devaru nag and tease, praise and flatter, blame and cajole each other, expressing and demanding care and concern” (S76).
What Bird-David asserted in her argument was that animism is less an intellectual solution to a Tylorian puzzle and more a relational experience in the world—less an epistemology (a way of knowing) than an ontology (a way of being and acting). In 2006 Graham Harvey offered his powerfully-named Animism: Respecting the Living World, in which he similarly contends that the basic issue is “the opposition between ‘persons’ and ‘objects’”: Persons are those with whom other persons interact with varying degrees of reciprocity. Persons may be spoken with. Objects, by contrast, are usually spoken about. Persons are volitional, relational, cultural and social beings. They demonstrate intentionality and agency with varying degrees of autonomy and freedom. That some persons look like objects [or do not have visible appearance at all] is of little more value to an understanding of [religion] than the notion that some acts, characteristics, qualia, and so on may appear human-like to some observers. Neither material form nor spiritual or mental faculties are definitive (2006: xvii).
Animism presents a reality, an ontology, in which (at least some of) the things that we regard as “objects,” other societies regard as “persons.”
Clearly, living in a world populated by non-human and ostensibly super-human persons is profoundly different from living in a world without such entities. Yet the social world and the spiritual world are
both personal worlds: the model for “religious” behaviors and relationships is human and social behaviors and relationships. Toward other humans, we show approval or disapproval, like or dislike, respect or disrespect, and various kinds and degrees of reciprocity and obligation. Our interactions have a “moral” character in that there are proper and improper, “good” and “bad,” ways to act toward each other. Religion is not a deviation from or contradiction of these principles but an extension of them. Harvey states that religion is like culture in general in that both “are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons” (xi)—human persons and non/superhuman persons equally. In fact, careful and constructive action toward non-super-human beings might be more imperative, since those beings are more potent.
References
Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (supplement): S67-91. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1976. “Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view.” In Paul Radin, ed. Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 357-390. Harvey, Graham. 2006. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia University Press.