Animism

Animism (from Latin: anima, meaning 'breath', 'spirit', or 'life') is the worldview or perception that various types of natural phenomena, including non-human organisms and often even landforms and inanimate objects, possess distinct spiritual essences, souls, or personhood. Animism assumes a wide view about which entities may be considered animate, thus typically perceiving animals, plants, rivers, weather systems, and other natural entities, plus in some cases human handiwork and words, as all having some degree of agency, life, and will. Animism is used in anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many indigenous peoples in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"). The term "animism" is an anthropological construct. A 2016 comparative study found that the oldest religious belief, present in the most recent common ancestor of hunter-gatherer groups, was animism, which would influence the later development of human religions in unseen forces, realms and spiritual beings. Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinions differ on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The accepted definition of animism was developed only in the late 19th century (1871) by Edward Tylor. It is "one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first". Animism encompasses beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no categorical distinction between the spiritual and physical world, and that soul, spirit,...