a few years ago I saw this infographic
making its rounds on Twitter a sprawling
family tree of the world's religions
stemming out of a primordial religion
called animism but what is animism and
isn't valid to portray it as the
earliest religion animism is rooted in
the Latin word anima which means soul or
spirit among other things and animism
does have a lot to do with spirits
the dictionary definition says the
attribution of a soul to inanimate
objects and natural phenomena and the
belief in a supernatural power that
organizes and animates the material
universe but this isn't the whole story
animism is often used as a synonym for
traditional and digital ins it's
associated with shamans ancestral
spirits religious traditions that are
often seen as the inverse of big
organized religions with texts
institutions and doctrine if you check
out the CIA World Factbook you'll see
countries cited as having a certain
percentage of their population as being
animist but kind of faso burma cameroon
guinea bissau so we're seeing to
possibly interrelated ways of using
animism first as a way to describe
modern indigenous religions as well as
calling animism the earliest religion so
what's going on here the 19th century
English anthropologist EB Tyler would
have loved this infographic because it
basically follows his theory that
animism was the fundamental form of
religion back in the late 1800s and
early 1900s European anthropologists
were obsessed with discovering the most
primitive religion and from their
colonialist perspective they based their
arguments on data from the indigenous
cultures of Australia Africa Oceania and
the Americas which they viewed as the
primitive cultures of the world
yeah we'll touch on European imperialism
in a bit so stay tuned using data from
contemporary indigenous cultures Tylor
crafted a two-part theory of animism
first the belief in souls or spirits to
illustrate how this might have arose in
early humans Tylor walked his readers
through a thought experiment imagine an
ancient human dreaming of a dead
relative Tyler argued that they would
have woken up and assumed that the dream
proved the existence of human
Sol's surviving after death that the
dead relative actually visited them or
it proved the ability of the human soul
to leave the body and travel to other
places
he wrote even in healthy waking life the
savage or barbarian has never learned to
make that rigid distinction between
subjective and objective between
imagination and reality so this belief
in spirits according to Tyler was rooted
in an ancient mistake or failure to
distinguish between dreams and reality
second Tyler argued that animism
involved primitive humanity's tendency
to falsely assume that inanimate objects
were alive Tyler's theory of animism was
basically an evolutionary theory of
religion according to him animism is the
first stage in an evolutionary tree of
increasing cultural complexity societies
first graduate to polytheism then to
monotheism before reaching the pinnacle
of cultural development scientific
rationalism for him animism survives in
modern religions as a remnant of former
evolutionary development kind of like a
primitive vestigial organ sticking
around in modern society in fact Darwin
himself was a fan of Tyler he even wrote
a letter to Tyler saying how much he
loved the evolutionary model of religion
now modern scholars have largely
rejected Tyler's version of animism
because of its ethnocentrism and
evolutionism first Tyler's theories are
untestable as the scholar of religion
Russell McCutcheon says we can't invent
a time machine and interview Paleolithic
humans when they wake up from sleep so
lacking that evidence
Tyler relied on speculation and using
data from contemporary indigenous
cultures evidence like reports from
European travelers and especially a book
on Zulu religion written by an Anglican
missionary but this book was written
during his lifetime a time of European
Christian proselytizing in South Africa
traditional African religious
communities were responding to
colonialism sometimes adapting their
religious beliefs to Christianity
sometimes struggling against them so a
lot of Tyler's data was evidence of
modern religious conflicts during an era
colonialism not evidence of the origins
of religion as I mentioned in my intro
to indigenous religions video studying
contemporary indigenous religion does
not equal studying religion as it was
100 thousand years ago
religions and cultures change so if you
want to study Paleolithic cultures
you better rely on Paleolithic evidence
using the tools of archaeology the
second problem with the evolution of
religions theory is that it's over
generalized it assumes that all cultures
progress through the same path of
development but you look around the
world and you see that cultural change
is much more complicated than that
you had societies like the Roman Empire
that was relatively advanced both
technologically and scientifically and
was overwhelmingly polytheistic which
Tyler called a religion characteristic
of low races same with China very
technologically advanced throughout its
history and very different from the
Christian monotheism of 19th century
Europe Tyler was making an ethnocentric
value judgment based on what he
considered was advanced he argued that
these tribes were cognitively
underdeveloped and that they were making
childlike mistakes when they ascribed
personality to objects or viewed dreams
as supernatural visions but modern
people still have near death experiences
visions or dreams and see these
experiences as supernatural events now
Tyler would call these experiences
primitive survival but I just call them
human these so called enchanted beliefs
and practices never went away
in fact the scholar bruno latour wrote
that it's not amazing that there are
people who still believe in animism but
that we're mad enough to think that
these beliefs have disappeared in the
first place so scholars have
overwhelmingly rejected Tyler's
evolution of religion theory and they
generally don't think of animism as the
foundation of all religion but many
today still see the category animism not
as a specific religion but as a way of
doing religion that is based on
relationships with the material and
natural world a type of religion that
sees personhood in non-human entities
like landscape objects and natural
phenomena as the scholar of religion
Graham Harvey argues
is religion in which the world is full
of persons only some of whom are human
we do see this a lot in contemporary
indigenous religions religions in which
the water and mountains are entities
with whom we can communicate like how
the native hawaiians view the volcano
Mauna Kea as an elder sibling or
religions in which particular spirits or
personalities can inhabit objects like
the BLA people in Burkina Faso who
believe that spirits inhabit masks in
fact a lot of people today self-identify
as animist and religious communities and
countries like Indonesia and Nigeria
have even sought formal recognition as
Animists for legal representation in
their countries and even though Tyler
would have called these cultures
primitive cultures these are modern
religions that are diverse and have
changed over time and are just as
complex as other religious traditions
now having said all that scholars do
think animism is a useful theory
explaining religious belief in practice
in early humans anthropologists like
Stuart Guthrie have argued that humans
have evolved a cognitive bias toward
animism also called hyperactive agency
detection we've evolved to detect agency
everywhere even in inanimate objects
because for early humans trying to
survive in the wild it's much better to
mistake a boulder for a bear than to
miss the bear entirely and get eaten but
this is nothing like Tyler's version of
animism which involves belief in
spiritual beings and making childish
mistakes about reality in Guthrie's
words this is more like a baseline
tendency in humans to see the world as
social but extending that social network
beyond humans to include landscape
animals objects and natural phenomena so
I'll admit that this infographic is
pretty cool and what it tries to
accomplish showing the influence of
different religions on each other over
the course of history but the trunk of
the tree needs an asterisk animism is
not primitive religion and the evolution
of species is a bad analogy for the
development of religion but animism can
be a useful way to describe religions
that see the world as full of agency and
personhood even in non-human entities as
always thanks for watching and I'll see
you next time
you