Definition Of Animism Apush Definition Of Animism In History

Religious belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence

Animism (from Latin: anima , 'breath, spirit, life')^[1] ^[2] is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence.^[iii] ^[4] ^[5] ^[6] Potentially, animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather condition systems, human handiwork, and perhaps fifty-fifty words—as animated and alive. Animism is used in the anthropology of religion as a term for the belief arrangement of many Indigenous peoples,^[7] especially in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organised religions.^[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 and so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they oftentimes do non even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion");^[nine] the term is an anthropological construct.

Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinion has differed on whether animism refers to an bequeathed mode of feel common to ethnic peoples around the world, or to a full-fledged religion in its ain correct. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the tardily 19th century (1871) by Sir Edward Tylor. It is "1 of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first".^[x]

Animism encompasses the beliefs that all fabric phenomena accept agency, that there exists no categorical stardom between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not just in humans but besides in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural surround: water sprites, vegetation deities, tree spirits, etc. Animism may further attribute a life strength to abstruse concepts such as words, truthful names, or metaphors in mythology. Some members of the non-tribal globe also consider themselves animists (such as author Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan, and many contemporary Pagans).^[11]

Etymology [edit]

Sir Edward Tylor had initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as spiritualism, only realised that such would cause confusion with the modern faith of spiritualism, which was then prevalent across Western nations.^[12] He adopted the term animism from the writings of German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl,^[13] who had adult the term animismus in 1708 as a biological theory that souls formed the vital principle and that the normal phenomena of life and the abnormal phenomena of affliction could be traced to spiritual causes.^[14]

The first known usage in English appeared in 1819.^[15]

History [edit]

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"Erstwhile animism" definitions [edit]

Earlier anthropological perspectives, which have since been termed the old animism, were concerned with knowledge on what is alive and what factors make something alive.^[16] The sometime animism assumed that animists were individuals who were unable to sympathize the difference between persons and things.^[17] Critics of the old animism have accused it of preserving "colonialist and dualist worldviews and rhetoric".^[18]

Edward Tylor's definition [edit]

Edward Tylor developed animism equally an anthropological theory.

The idea of animism was adult by anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor through his 1871 volume Archaic Civilization,^[1] in which he defined it equally "the full 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;"^[19] a belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. This conception was picayune different from that proposed past Auguste Comte as "fetishism",^[20] but the terms at present take distinct meanings.

For Tylor, animism represented the earliest form of religion, being situated within an evolutionary framework of religion that has adult in stages and which will ultimately lead to humanity rejecting organized religion altogether in favor of scientific rationality.^[21] Thus, for Tylor, animism was fundamentally seen as a fault, a bones error from which all religion grew.^[21] He did not believe that animism was inherently illogical, but he suggested that it arose from early humans' dreams and visions and thus was a rational arrangement. However, information technology was based on erroneous, unscientific observations virtually the nature of reality.^[22] Stringer notes that his reading of Archaic Civilisation 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 divergence betwixt the intellectual capabilities of "savage" people and Westerners.^[4]

The idea that in that location had once been "ane universal form of primitive organized religion" (whether labeled animism, totemism, or shamanism) has been dismissed as "unsophisticated" and "erroneous" past archeologist Timothy Insoll, who stated that "it removes complexity, a precondition of faith now, in all its variants".^[23]

[edit]

Tylor's definition of animism was part of a growing international argue on the nature of "primitive society" by lawyers, theologians, and philologists. The debate defined the field of research of a new scientific discipline: anthropology. Past the cease of the 19th century, an orthodoxy on "primitive society" had emerged, but few anthropologists nonetheless would have that definition. The "19th-century armchair anthropologists" argued, "primitive society" (an evolutionary category) was ordered by kinship and divided into exogamous descent groups related by a serial of spousal relationship exchanges. Their religion was animism, the belief that natural species and objects had souls.

With the development of private property, the 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 fewer members of that gild believed in animism. Yet, any remnant ideologies of souls or spirits, to Tylor, represented "survivals" of the original animism of early on humanity.^[24]

The term ["animism"] clearly began equally an expression of a nest of insulting approaches to ethnic peoples and the earliest putatively religious humans. Information technology was and sometimes remains, a colonialist slur.

—Graham Harvey, 2005.^[25]

Confounding animism with totemism [edit]

In 1869 (three years later Tylor proposed his definition of animism), Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLennan, argued that the animistic thinking axiomatic in fetishism gave ascension^{[ colloquialism? ]} to a faith he named totemism. Archaic people believed, he argued, that they were descended from the same species as their totemic brute.^[xx] Subsequent debate by the "armchair anthropologists" (including J. J. Bachofen, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud) remained focused on totemism rather than animism, with few direct challenging Tylor's definition. Anthropologists "have commonly avoided the upshot of animism and even the term itself rather than revisit this prevalent notion in light of their new and rich ethnographies".^[26]

According to anthropologist Tim Ingold, animism shares similarities to totemism just differs in its focus on individual spirit beings which aid to perpetuate life, whereas totemism more typically holds that there is a master source, such as the land itself or the ancestors, who provide the basis to life. Certain indigenous religious groups such as the Australian Aboriginals are more typically totemic in their worldview, whereas others like the Inuit are more typically animistic.^[27]

From his studies into kid development, Jean Piaget suggested that children were born with an innate animist worldview in which they anthropomorphized inanimate objects and that information technology was just afterward that they grew out of this belief.^[28] Conversely, from her ethnographic inquiry, Margaret Mead argued the reverse, believing that children were not born with an animist worldview but that they became acculturated to such beliefs every bit they were educated by their society.^[28]

Stewart Guthrie saw animism—or "attribution" every bit he preferred it—as an evolutionary strategy to aid survival. He argued that both humans and other animal species view inanimate objects as potentially alive equally a means of being constantly on guard against potential threats.^[29] His suggested explanation, nonetheless, did not deal with the question of why such a belief became primal to the religion.^[30] In 2000, Guthrie suggested that the "nearly widespread" concept of animism was that information technology was the "attribution of spirits to natural phenomena such equally stones and trees".^[31]

"New animism" non-archaic definitions [edit]

Many anthropologists ceased using the term animism, deeming it to exist as well close to early anthropological theory and religious polemic.^[xviii] However, the term had also been claimed by religious groups—namely indigenous communities and nature worshipers—who felt that information technology aptly described their ain beliefs, and who in some cases actively identified as "animists".^[32] It was thus readopted by diverse scholars, who began using the term in a different style,^[18] placing the focus on knowing how to behave toward other beings, some of whom are not man.^[16] As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey stated, while the "old animist" definition had been problematic, the term animism was notwithstanding "of considerable value as a disquisitional, academic term for a style of religious and cultural relating to the world."^[33]

Hallowell and the Ojibwe [edit]

Five Ojibwe chiefs in the 19th century; it was anthropological studies of Ojibwe organized religion that resulted in the development of the "new animism".

The new animism emerged largely from the publications of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, produced on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Ojibwe communities of Canada in the mid-20th century.^[34] For the Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood did not require human-likeness, simply rather humans were perceived equally being similar other persons, who for example included rock persons and bear persons.^[35] For the Ojibwe, these persons were each wilful beings who gained meaning and power through their interactions with others; through respectfully interacting with other persons, they themselves learned to "act equally a person".^[35]

Hallowell's approach to the understanding of Ojibwe personhood differed strongly from prior anthropological concepts of animism.^[36] He emphasized the demand to challenge the modernist, Western perspectives of what a person is by entering into a dialogue with different worldwide-views.^[35] Hallowell'southward arroyo influenced the work of anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who produced a scholarly article reassessing the idea of animism in 1999.^[37] Seven comments from other academics were provided in the journal, debating Bird-David's ideas.^[38]

Postmodern anthropology [edit]

More recently,^{[ when? ]} 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 civilisation from nature. In the modernist view, animism is the inverse of scientism, and hence is deemed inherently invalid by some anthropologists. Cartoon on the piece of work of Bruno Latour, some anthropologists question modernist assumptions and theorize that all societies proceed to "animate" the world around them. In dissimilarity to Tylor's reasoning, however, this "animism" is considered to exist more than than just a remnant of primitive idea. More specifically, the "animism" of modernity is characterized by humanity's "professional subcultures", as in the ability to treat the world as a discrete entity within a delimited sphere of action.

Human being beings continue to create personal relationships with elements of the aforementioned objective globe, such as pets, cars, or teddy-bears, which are recognized as subjects. Equally such, these entities are "approached every bit communicative subjects rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists".^[39] These approaches aim to avoid the modernist assumption that the environment consists of a physical world singled-out from the world of humans, equally well as the modernist conception of the person existence composed dualistically from a body and a soul.^[26]

Nurit Bird-David argues that:^[26]

Positivistic ideas almost the meaning of 'nature', 'life' and 'personhood' misdirected these previous attempts to sympathize the local concepts. Classical theoreticians (it is argued) attributed their ain modernist ideas of self to 'archaic peoples' while asserting that the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of cocky 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 whatsoever 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 include "superpersons" (i.e. not-humans).

Stewart Guthrie expressed criticism of Bird-David'southward mental attitude towards animism, believing that it promulgated the view that "the globe is in large measure whatever our local imagination makes it". This, he felt, would consequence in anthropology abandoning "the scientific project".^[40]

Similar Bird-David, Tim Ingold argues that animists do not see themselves every bit separate from their surroundings:^[41]

Hunter-gatherers practise not, as a dominion, approach their environment as an external earth of nature that has to be 'grasped' intellectually … indeed the separation of heed and nature has no place in their thought and practice.

Rane Willerslev extends the argument by noting that animists pass up this Cartesian dualism and that the animist self identifies with the world, "feeling at one time within and apart from it so that the ii glide ceaselessly in and out of each other in a sealed excursion".^[42] The animist hunter is thus aware of himself every bit a human being hunter, but, through mimicry is able to assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensibilities of his prey, to be one with it.^[43] Shamanism, in this view, is an everyday attempt to influence spirits of ancestors and animals past mirroring their behaviors as the hunter does his prey.

Upstanding and ecological understanding [edit]

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 feel, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus", coaxing the perceiving trunk into an ongoing participation with those things.^[44] ^[45]

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 contemporary cognitive and natural science, also every bit upon the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous oral cultures, Abram proposes a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology in which affair is live. He suggests that such a relational ontology is in close accord with our spontaneous perceptual experience; information technology would describe united states back to our senses and to the primacy of the sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and upstanding relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters, and weather condition-patterns that materially sustains the states.^[44] ^[45]

In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which usually provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic business relationship of reason itself. He holds that civilized reason is sustained only by intensely animistic participation between human beings and their ain written signs. For instance, as presently equally nosotros turn our gaze toward the alphabetic letters written on a page or a screen, we "run across what they say"—the letters, that is, seem to speak to u.s.a.—much as spiders, copse, gushing rivers and lichen-encrusted boulders once spoke to our oral ancestors. For Abram, reading tin usefully be understood as an intensely concentrated form of animism, i 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 mode—to provide an animistic account of reason, rather than the other mode around—is to imply that animism is the wider and more than 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, cogitating reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous earth that sustains information technology.^[46]

Relation to the concept of 'I-1000' [edit]

Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defined animism as the belief "that the earth is total of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others".^[16] He added that it is therefore "concerned with learning how to be a expert person in respectful relationships with other persons".^[xvi]

In his Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013), Harvey identifies the animist perspective in line with Martin Buber's "I-yard" 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 every bit a "chiliad" rather than as an "it".^[47]

Religion [edit]

A tableau presenting figures of diverse cultures filling in mediator-like roles, often existence termed as "shaman" in the literature.

There is ongoing^{[ when? ]} disagreement (and no general consensus) as to whether animism is but a singular, broadly encompassing religious belief^[48] or a worldview in and of itself, comprising many diverse mythologies found worldwide in many diverse cultures.^[49] ^[50] This also raises a controversy regarding the ethical claims animism may or may not make:^{[ according to whom? ]} whether animism ignores questions of ethics altogether;^[51] or, by endowing diverse not-human elements of nature with spirituality or personhood,^[52] in fact promotes a circuitous ecological ideals.^[53]

Concepts [edit]

Stardom from pantheism [edit]

Animism is non the same as pantheism, although the 2 are sometimes confused. Moreover, some religions are both pantheistic and animistic. I of the main differences is that while animists believe everything to be spiritual in nature, they do not necessarily run into the spiritual nature of everything in beingness as existence united (monism), the way pantheists practice. Every bit a result, animism puts more than accent on the uniqueness of each individual soul. In pantheism, everything shares the same spiritual essence, rather than having distinct spirits or souls.^[54] ^[55]

Fetishism / totemism [edit]

In many animistic globe views, the human being is oftentimes regarded as on a roughly equal footing with other animals, plants, and natural forces.^[56]

African indigenous religions [edit]

Traditional African religions: well-nigh religious traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa, which are basically a complex class of animism with polytheistic and shamanistic elements and ancestor worship.^[57]

In North Africa, the traditional Berber organized religion includes the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the Berber people.

Asian origin religions [edit]

Indian-origin religions [edit]

Sculpture of the Buddha meditating under the Maha Bodhi Tree of Bodh Gaya in Republic of india.

During Vat Purnima festival married women tying threads effectually a banyan tree.

In the Indian-origin religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, the animistic aspects of nature worship and ecological conservation are part of the cadre conventionalities arrangement.

Matsya Purana, a Hindu text, has a Sanskrit language shloka (hymn), which explains the importance of reverence of ecology. It states, "A pond equals ten wells, a reservoir equals ten ponds, while a son equals ten reservoirs, and a tree equals x sons." ^[58] India religions worship trees such as Bodhi Tree and numerous superlative banyan trees, conserve the sacred groves of India, revere the rivers every bit sacred and worship the mountains and their ecology.

Panchavati are the sacred trees in Indic religions, which are scared groves containing five type of trees, normally chosen from amid the Vata (ficus benghalensis, Banyan), Ashvattha (ficus religiosa, Peepal), Bilva (aegle marmelos, Bengal Quince), Amalaki (phyllanthus emblica, Indian Gooseberry, Amla), Ashoka (Saraca asoca, Ashok), Udumbara (ficus racemosa, Cluster Fig, Gular), Nimba (Azadirachta indica, Neem) and Shami (prosopis spicigera, Indian Mesquite).^[59] ^[60]

The banyan is considered holy in several religious traditions of India. The Ficus benghalensis is the national tree of Bharat.^[61] Vat Purnima is a Hindu festival related to the banyan tree. Vat Purnima is observed past married women in North India and in the Western Indian states of Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat.^[62] During the three days of the month of Jyeshtha in the Hindu calendar (which falls in May–June in the Gregorian calendar) married women find a fast and tie threads around a banyan tree and pray for the well-being of their husbands.^[63] Thimmamma Marrimanu, sacred to Indian religions, has a branches spread of over v acres and listed every bit the world's largest banyan tree in the Guinness World Records in 1989.^[64] ^[65]

In Hinduism, the leaf of the banyan tree is said to be the resting place for the god Krishna. In the Bhagavat Gita, Krishna said, "There is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down, and the Vedic hymns are its leaves. Ane who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas." (Bg fifteen.ane) Hither the material globe is described as a tree whose roots are upwards and branches are below. Nosotros have experience of a tree whose roots are upward: if one stands on the bank of a river or whatsoever reservoir of water, he can run into that the trees reflected in the water are upside down. The branches become downwardly and the roots upward. Similarly, this material world is a reflection of the spiritual world. The material world is but a shadow of reality. In the shadow at that place is no reality or substantiality, but from the shadow we can empathise that there is substance and reality.

In Buddhism's Pali canon, the banyan (Pali: nigrodha)^[66] is referenced numerous times.^[67] Typical metaphors allude to the banyan's epiphytic nature, likening the banyan'south supplanting of a host tree as comparable to the way sensual want (kāma) overcomes humans.^[68]

Mun (besides known equally Munism or Bongthingism): the traditional polytheistic, animist, shamanistic, and syncretic organized religion of the Lepcha people.^[69] ^[70] ^[71]

Japan and Shinto [edit]

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Shinto, including the Ryukyuan religion, are the traditional Japanese folk religion, which has many animist aspects.

Kalash people [edit]

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Kalash people of Northern Islamic republic of pakistan follow an ancient animistic religion identified with an ancient form of Hinduism.^[72]

Korea [edit]

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Muism, the native Korean conventionalities, has many animist aspects.^[73]

Philippines' native belief [edit]

A 1922 photograph of an Itneg female priestess in the Philippines making an offering to an apdel, a guardian anito spirit of her village that reside in the water-worn stones known as pinaing.^[74]

In the Indigenous religious behavior of the Philippines, pre-colonial religions of Philippines and Philippine mythology, the animism is office of their cadre belief as demonstrated by the belief in Anito and Bathala as well as their conservation and veneration of sacred Indigenous Philippine shrines, forests, mountains and sacred grounds.

Anito (lit. '[ancestor] spirit'): the various ethnic shamanistic folk religions of the Philippines, led by female person or feminized male shamans known as babaylan. It includes belief in a spirit world existing alongside and interacting with the fabric world, as well as the belief that everything has a spirit, from rocks and trees to animals and humans to natural phenomena.^[75] ^[76]

In indigenous Filipino belief, the Bathala is the omnipotent deity which was derived from Sanskrit word for the Hindu supreme deity bhattara,^[77] ^[78] as one of the avatara 10 avatars of Hindu god Vishnu.^[79] ^[lxxx] The omnipotent Bathala also presides over the spirits of ancestors called Anito.^[81] ^[82] ^[83] ^[84] Anitos, serves as intermediary between mortals and the divine, such as Agni (Hindu) who holds the access to divine realms; hence the reason why they are invoked first and the offset to receive offerings, regardless of the deity they want to pray to.^[85] ^[86]

Abrahamic religions [edit]

The Old Attestation and the Wisdom literature preach the omnipresence of God (Jeremiah 23:24) (Proverbs 15: three) (1 Kings 8:27). God is bodily nowadays in the Incarnation (Christianity) of his Son, Jesus Christ. (Gospel of John one:fourteen, Colossians 2:nine).^[87]

With ascension awareness of ecological preservation, recently theologians like Mark I. Wallace argue for animism Christian with a biocentric approach that understands God being present in all earthly objects, such as animals, trees, and rocks.^[88]

Pre-Islamic Arab religion [edit]

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Pre-Islamic Arab religion can refer to the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the peoples of the Arabian people.

Neopagan and New Age movements [edit]

Some Neopagan groups, including Eco-pagans, depict themselves every bit animists, meaning that they respect the various community of living beings and spirits with whom humans share the world and cosmos.^[89]

The New Historic period movement usually demonstrates animistic traits in asserting the existence of nature spirits.^[90]

Shamanism [edit]

A shaman is a person regarded equally having access to, and influence in, the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits, who typically enters into a trance land during a ritual, and practices divination and healing.^[91]

According to Mircea Eliade, shamanism encompasses the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to care for ailments and illnesses by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul or spirit restores the physical body of the private to residue and wholeness. The shaman besides enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds or dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to improve illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily inside the spiritual world, which in turn affects the man world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of the ailment.^[92]

Abram, however, articulates a less supernatural and much more ecological understanding of the shaman's role than that propounded by Eliade. Cartoon upon his own field research in Republic of indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, Abram suggests that in animistic cultures, the shaman functions primarily as an intermediary betwixt the human customs and the more than-than-man community of active agencies—the local animals, plants, and landforms (mountains, rivers, forests, winds, and weather patterns, all of which are felt to take their own specific sentience). Hence, the shaman's ability to heal individual instances of dis-ease (or imbalance) within the human customs is a past-product of their more continual practice of balancing the reciprocity between the human community and the wider collective of breathing beings in which that community is embedded.^[93]

Animist life [edit]

Non-human animals [edit]

Animism entails the belief that "all living things accept a soul",^{[ This quote needs a citation ]} and thus a central business of animist thought surrounds how animals can be eaten or otherwise used for humans' subsistence needs.^[94] The deportment of non-human animals are viewed as "intentional, planned and purposive",^[95] and they are understood to be persons because they are both live and communicate with others.^[96]

In animist globe-views, non-homo animals are understood to participate in kinship systems and ceremonies with humans, as well as having their ain kinship systems and ceremonies.^[97] Harvey cited an example of an animist understanding of beast behavior that occurred at a powwow held by the Conne River Mi'kmaq in 1996; an eagle flew over the proceedings, circling over the key drum group. The assembled participants chosen out kitpu ('eagle'), conveying welcome to the bird and expressing pleasure at its beauty, and they afterward articulated the view that the eagle'south actions reflected its approval of the event and the Mi'kmaq'due south render to traditional spiritual practices.^[98]

Flora [edit]

Some animists also view found and fungi life equally persons and collaborate with them accordingly.^[99] The near common encounter betwixt humans and these constitute and fungi persons is with the former's drove of the latter for nutrient, and for animists, this interaction typically has to be carried out respectfully.^[100] Harvey cited the example of Maori communities in New Zealand, who often offer karakia invocations to sweet potatoes as they dig the latter upwardly; while doing and then there is an awareness of a kinship human relationship between the Maori and the sweet potatoes, with both understood as having arrived in Aotearoa together in the same canoes.^[100]

In other instances, animists believe that interaction with establish and fungi persons tin can result in the communication of things unknown or even otherwise unknowable.^[99] Among some mod Pagans, for example, relationships are cultivated with specific trees, who are understood to bestow knowledge or physical gifts, such as flowers, sap, or wood that tin can be used as firewood or to fashion into a wand; in render, these Pagans give offerings to the tree itself, which can come in the form of libations of mead or ale, a drop of claret from a finger, or a strand of wool.^[101]

The elements [edit]

Various animistic cultures besides encompass stones as persons.^[102] Discussing ethnographic piece of work conducted amidst the Ojibwe, Harvey noted that their society by and large conceived of stones equally being inanimate, but with 2 notable exceptions: the stones of the Bell Rocks and those stones which are situated beneath copse struck by lightning, which were understood to accept become Thunderers themselves.^[103] The Ojibwe conceived of weather every bit being capable of having personhood, with storms being conceived of as persons known as 'Thunderers' whose sounds conveyed communications and who engaged in seasonal disharmonize over the lakes and forests, throwing lightning at lake monsters.^[103] Wind, similarly, can exist conceived as a person in animistic thought.^[104]

The importance of place is besides a recurring element of animism, with some places being understood to be persons in their own right.^[105]

Spirits [edit]

Animism tin can besides entail relationships existence established with non-corporeal spirit entities.^[106]

Other usage [edit]

Science [edit]

In the early on 20th century, William McDougall defended a grade of animism in his book Trunk and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism (1911).

Physicist Nick Herbert has argued for "breakthrough animism" in which the mind permeates the world at every level:

The quantum consciousness assumption, which amounts to a kind of "quantum animism" too asserts that consciousness is an integral office of the physical earth, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. Since everything in the globe is on some level a quantum system, this supposition requires that everything be conscious on that level. If the globe is truly quantum blithe, then at that place is an immense amount of invisible inner experience going on all around usa that is presently inaccessible to humans, considering our own inner lives are imprisoned within a small quantum system, isolated deep in the meat of an animal brain.^[107]

Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his breakthrough Animism:

Herbert's quantum Animism differs from traditional Animism in that it avoids assuming a dualistic model of heed and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some kind of spirit inhabits a body and makes it move, a ghost in the motorcar. Herbert's breakthrough Animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which it directs and observes its activity.^[108]

In Mistake and Loss: A Licence to Enchantment,^[109] Ashley Curtis (2018) has argued that the Cartesian idea of an experiencing discipline facing off with an inert physical world is breathless at its very foundation and that this incoherence is predicted rather than belied by Darwinism. Homo reason (and its rigorous extension in the natural sciences) fits an evolutionary niche just as echolocation does for bats and infrared vision does for pit vipers, and is—according to western science's own dictates—epistemologically on par with, rather than superior to, such capabilities. The significant or aliveness of the "objects" we encounter—rocks, trees, rivers, other animals—thus depends its validity not on a discrete cognitive judgment, but purely on the quality of our feel. The animist experience, and the wolf's or raven's experience, thus get licensed as as valid worldviews to the modern western scientific one; they are more valid, since they are not plagued with the incoherence that inevitably crops up^{[ colloquialism ]} when "objective existence" is separated from "subjective experience".

Socio-political bear on [edit]

Harvey opined that animism'due south views on personhood represented a radical challenge to the dominant perspectives of modernity, because information technology accords "intelligence, rationality, consciousness, volition, bureau, intentionality, language, and desire" to not-humans.^[110] Similarly, it challenges the view of man uniqueness that is prevalent in both Abrahamic religions and Western rationalism.^[111]

Fine art and literature [edit]

Animist beliefs tin can besides be expressed through artwork.^[112] For instance, among the Maori communities of New Zealand, there is an acknowledgement that creating fine art through carving forest or stone entails violence against the wood or stone person and that the persons who are damaged therefore accept to exist placated and respected during the procedure; any backlog or waste from the creation of the artwork is returned to the land, while the artwork itself is treated with particular respect.^[113] Harvey, therefore, argued that the creation of art among the Maori was not about creating an inanimate object for display, but rather a transformation of dissimilar persons within a relationship.^[114]

Harvey expressed the view that animist worldviews were present in various works of literature, citing such examples as the writings of Alan Garner, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Daniel Quinn, Linda Hogan, David Abram, Patricia Grace, Chinua Achebe, Ursula Le Guin, Louise Erdrich, and Marge Piercy.^[115]

Animist worldviews have also been identified in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.^[116] ^[117] ^[118] ^[119]

References [edit]

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