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Animism: The First Religion?
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- 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
Zum Nachlesen
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