ANIMISM

belief in spiritual beings who are concerned with human affairs and capable of intervening in thema belief pervasive among most tribal or primitive peoples. Animistic beliefs were first competently surveyed by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in the late 19th century. Tylor wrote his great work, Primitive Culture (1871), in order to prove that religion began in animism. In his view, animism is the attribution of a soul or spirit to living things and inanimate objects. In full-blown animism nothing is really inanimate; everything is alive with spirit, active or not. Further, Tylor observed, every individual is regarded as being endowed not only with a life-spirit but also with a phantom, such as appears to others in dreams or visions. Both life and phantom are perceived to be separable from the body: the life as able to go away and leave it insensible or dead, and the phantom as appearing to people at a distance. The second step taken by Tylor's ancient savage philosophers was to combine the life and the phantom and thus arrive at that well-known conception which may be described as an apparitional soul, a ghost-soul. Tylor argued that in further steps of reasoning it was thought that the ghost-soul was able to enter into, possess, and act in animals, plants, and objects (e.g., weapons, clothing, food). Tylor felt that religion had its origin in early man's attribution of a soul like his own to every sort of living being and physical object around him. Religion is man's establishment of a relationship between himself and the spirits that he felt possessed, pervaded, crowded all nature. Even though Tylor's theory has impressed anthropologists with its plausibility, his notion of ancient savage philosophers who developed theories to explain death and dreams has been widely criticized as too intellectualistic. It also began to be felt that the facts are misinterpreted when it is said that the primitive man considers all objects to be alive. Later scholars, responding to evidence of simpler beliefs that yet entailed a properly religious awe toward the sacred, began to debate the possibilities of a preanimistic stage of theological evolution. British anthropologist R.R. Marett, notably in his book The Threshold of Religion (1914), limited the conception of aliveness to objects that attracted special attention, either by their appearance or by their behaviour. In addition, he asserted that the potency or aliveness attributed to such objects did not necessarily correspond to soul or spirit. Marett found confirmation of his theory in the Melanesian conception of mana, a kind of communicable energy. mile Durkheim, a French sociologist, in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), held that religion originated in totemism, which in turn derived from the expectation of security in the bosom of society. Durkheim has been criticized for not seeing totemism as one animistic cult among many. Still other theorists of this period, notably Sir James G. Frazer in his The Golden Bough (18901915), argued that religion sprang from man's frustrated attempt to control nature by means of his own crude magical science. The term animism, as it survives in contemporary anthropological usage, denotes not a single creed or doctrine but rather a view of the world consistent with a certain range of religious beliefs and practices, many of which may survive in more complex and hierarchical religions.