# Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism?’, 2016 > [!cite] > Wilkinson, Darryl. ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism?’ Preprint, Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, 2016. [https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfw064](https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfw064). > [!abstract] > This article considers the recent reemergence of the category of animism in the anthropological study of religion, a concept that has once again become fashionable after a long period of scholarly disuse. This “new animism,” as it is called by many of its proponents, seeks to move away from the original animism that was the basis for much Victorian thought on indigenous religions and which rested upon now largely discredited social evolutionist paradigms. I discuss this renewed interest in indigenous animism in terms of its place within recent intellectual history, especially the growing engagement with the global environmental crisis among scholars in the humanities. I argue that the new animism is only selectively “indigenous” in its promotion of non-Western ontologies, and suggest that it is ultimately best understood as a kind of analytical metaphor rather than an objective category of religious practice that exists out there in the world. --- ‘\[…] Sir Edward Tylor (1871 \[1920]), who in his foundational work *Primitive Culture* defined animism as the earliest religious condition of humankind, thereby imbuing the word with its classic scholarly meaning.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 2)]] ^f49cdb ‘World religions are normally presented as specific, distinct traditions, each having their unique historical origins. Thus they are listed as proper nouns: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, and so on. By contrast, indigenous religions are seldom denoted by proper nouns but instead are enumerated as various transhistorical types defined by shared traits, the most common examples being (alongside animism) ancestor worship, totemism, fetishism, and shamanism.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 2)]] ‘ \[…] indeed the very bifurcation of religion into historical forms (“world religions”) and ahistorical forms (“indigenous religions”) is deeply problematic.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 3)]] ‘Despite animism’s present comeback, the problematic baggage carried by the term is far from lost on those scholars now seeking to recuperate it, and so it is commonplace to read about the “New Animism” defined in contradistinction to the old one. The foundational texts of this new animism include works by Graham Harvey (2006), Tim Ingold (2006), Nurit Bird-David (1999, 2006), and Phillipe Descola (2005), among others. Basic to this recuperative project has been an emphasis on the existence of various nonhuman, other-than-human, and more-than-human persons in non-Western societies. This comprises part of a critique of dualist ontologies (associated with modernity in general, and secular humanism specifically) that posit absolute distinctions between a subject world made up exclusively of *Homo sapiens*, and an object world that covers everything else. In opposition to Western dualisms that hinge around fundamental distinctions between mind and body, person and thing, culture and nature, it is now commonplace to read about various “relational ontologies” that stand outside such essentialist binaries (e.g., Castree 2003; Whatmore 2006; for a recent review, see Watts 2014).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 3)]] ^c97d8a ‘In Western thought, humans classically occupy both sides of the dualistic divisions. That is, they have both minds and bodies, they are both persons and things, they are simultaneously products of nature and of culture. Animals by contrast have *only* bodies, are *only* things, and are products of nature, but not culture. Thus the frequently cited animist notion that animals can be persons too is seen as disrupting long-established Western and modern premises about what is true of the world.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 3–4)]] ‘The basic problem that arose with the old animism, and the main reason why it eventually fell into disuse among anthropologists, was that from the beginning it was intended as a pejorative. According to its most basic definition, it is the *false* attribution of conscious agency to beings that are in truth inert. Consider one of Tylor’s succinct explications of the term, whereby animism is summarized as “the belief in the animation of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to personification. This, no occasional or hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound up with that primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will” (1920, 285).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 4)]] ^763839 ‘Animism was for Tylor a self-evidently false belief system, although it is worth noting that for him the error was less one of faulty cognition per se, and more a consequence of correct reasoning albeit from flawed premises (e.g., Tylor 1920, 427–30). In other words, animism was a rational proposition in itself, but its precepts were ultimately grounded in a basic ignorance of empirical reality.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 4–5)]] ^3eab59 ‘We can compare the old animism with the new by setting Tylor’s words alongside the influential definition offered by Graham Harvey: “Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others” (2006, xi).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 5)]] ‘For Elizabeth Harrison-Buck, “there is a risk that the indiscriminate use of the term animism will serve, at best, as a replacement for the term indigenous and, at worst, a shorthand for primitivity” (2012, 65).’ ‘[[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 18)]]’ ‘Nicolas Peterson (2011) takes a critical stance towards the new animism with respect to its engagement with the ontologies of Aboriginal peoples on just such grounds, asking how literal are Aboriginal claims that the “landscape is sentient” or that “rocks have ears and can listen to humans.” For Peterson, the new animism “fails to reflect the complexity of their highly intellectual and richly metaphorical ontology, replacing it with an overly literal ‘relational’ ontology” (2011, 177). In other words, he argues that the new animists are misconstruing the metaphorical claims of indigenous peoples as literal ones. Scholars, he suggests, should not accept such accounts of supposedly relational ontologies at face value, because the people who deploy them are themselves speaking in a figurative register.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 17)]] ‘Whereas the old Victorian animism was intended to demonstrate the superiority of European epistemologies by showing how far they had advanced from the primitive religiosity of humankind, the new animism is an explicit inversion of this.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 6)]] ‘And for a time, fetishism even vied with animism as the postulated original religion of humankind (Ellen 1998, 213–14).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 7)]] ‘In other words, fetishism is typically seen as the imputation of mind to items of *material culture* (figurines, charms, and so on), while animism refers to the related misattribution of humanlike agency to *natural* entities (e.g., animals, rocks, plants, or meteorological phenomena).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 7–8)]] ‘Sigurd Bergmann, for example, makes it clear that just as animism is the potential (spiritual) solution, fetishism is the *problem*. For him, capitalist modernity is itself fetishism by definition, and so it entails a “repression of animist worldviews and practices” (2014, 59–62).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 9)]] ‘Again, it is the specter of our contemporary environmental crisis that offers the necessary context for understanding all this, and in particular the notion of the Anthropocene, an increasingly influential idea within the academy over the last decade. Although it originally began as a geological concept coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), it was quickly adopted by humanists and social scientists as well—the work of the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) being an important vehicle for its scholarly propagation. It was, after all, in the mid-2000s, and especially the early 2010s that the new animism emerged as a significant cross-disciplinary phenomenon.’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 12)]] ‘Bergmann states that “anthropogenic climate change represents, in such an analytical horizon, nothing more than the outermost c onsequence of fetishization as a cardinal human sin” (2014, 62).’ [[Wilkinson, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Animism’, 2016|(Wilkinson 2016, 12)]]