Animism

Not a primitive theory of matter, as the Victorians assumed — a way of treating some non-human things as persons, and one that has recently started winning court cases.

What it is

Animism is the attribution of personhood — interiority, intention, the capacity to be in relationship — to entities other than human beings: animals, plants, rivers, mountains, weather, sometimes tools and houses.

The popular definition, that animists believe objects "have spirits inside them", is a nineteenth-century misreading that has proved very hard to kill. The better account is that animism is not a claim about what things are made of. It is a claim about how some things are to be treated — as parties you are in a relationship with, with their own perspective and their own claims on you, rather than as resources.

The difference matters practically. A theory about the internal composition of a river is untestable and largely idle. A stance that a river is someone you owe obligations to produces entirely different behaviour, and is not obviously refuted by chemistry.

Where it came from

The term was coined by the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor proposed animism as the minimum definition of religion and as its earliest evolutionary stage: early humans, reasoning from dreams and death about a separable soul, mistakenly extended that soul to the rest of nature. Religion, on this account, began as a cognitive error that later stages corrected.

Almost everything in that framing has been abandoned. The evolutionary ladder — animism to polytheism to monotheism to science — reflected Victorian assumptions rather than evidence, and the peoples described as occupying its lowest rung turned out, on closer study, not to hold the beliefs attributed to them.

The reframing came from ethnographers who asked more carefully. Irving Hallowell, working with the Ojibwe in the 1930s–50s, found that his hosts did not divide the world into animate and inanimate objects but recognised a category of other-than-human persons — a social category, not a physical one. Hallowell's often-quoted exchange, in which an elder asked whether all stones are alive replied that some are, is not confused metaphysics. It is a statement that personhood is a relational status rather than a property of a substance.

Later work built on this: Nurit Bird-David's "relational epistemology" (1999), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism from Amazonia, and Graham Harvey's Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005), which gave the reframed version its common name — the "new animism".

How it is used

Animist structures underlie a great deal of what appears elsewhere on this site: shamanic practice, folk traditions of place, sacred trees and springs, and much of the modern pagan revival, which has adopted the term approvingly.

Its most striking modern appearance is legal. In 2017 New Zealand passed the Te Awa Tupua Act, recognising the Whanganui River as a legal person with rights and appointing guardians to speak for it — an outcome of long negotiation with Whanganui iwi, whose position is that the river is an ancestor rather than a resource. Indian courts granted comparable status to the Ganges and Yamuna the same year, though that ruling was subsequently stayed, and similar arguments have been made in Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia.

Environmental ethics has taken this seriously, less as metaphysics than as a workable legal device: a river with standing can be represented in court, and a river that is only property cannot.

What we can and cannot say

We can say Tylor's account is discredited both as history and as description, and that "animism" is an outsider's category — a word applied to hundreds of unrelated traditions by people who did not hold them. It groups things that may not belong together, and this site uses it as a convenience, not as a claim that these traditions are one thing.

We can say the relational reading is better supported by the ethnography. Repeatedly, peoples described as animist turn out to be doing something more like extending social protocols than proposing a physics.

We can say the practical consequences are real and measurable, whatever the metaphysics. Traditions that treat a landscape as a party to a relationship manage it differently, and there is a substantial literature on Indigenous land management outcomes that does not depend on settling what a river is.

We cannot say whether rivers or stones have interiority. Ethnography can establish what people believe and how they act; it cannot reach the question itself. That question connects to panpsychism, where philosophers arrive at a superficially similar position by an entirely different route — and it is worth noting that the resemblance is partial. Panpsychism proposes minimal experience distributed everywhere. Animism proposes particular persons, with names, whom you can offend.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is used

What we can and cannot say

Further reading