Animism: The First Religion?
ReligionForBreakfast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYZ5xNyKbc

Transkript (automatisch erstellt)

0:00 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
0:08 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
0:18 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
0:26 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
0:35 animism is often used as a synonym for traditional and digital ins it's associated with shamans ancestral spirits religious traditions that are
0:45 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
0:54 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
1:04 possibly interrelated ways of using animism first as a way to describe modern indigenous religions as well as calling animism the earliest religion so
1:15 what's going on here the 19th century English anthropologist EB Tyler would have loved this infographic because it basically follows his theory that
1:23 animism was the fundamental form of religion back in the late 1800s and early 1900s European anthropologists were obsessed with discovering the most
1:33 primitive religion and from their colonialist perspective they based their arguments on data from the indigenous cultures of Australia Africa Oceania and
1:42 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
1:51 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
2:01 early humans Tylor walked his readers through a thought experiment imagine an ancient human dreaming of a dead relative Tyler argued that they would
2:09 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
2:19 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
2:28 savage or barbarian has never learned to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective between imagination and reality so this belief
2:39 in spirits according to Tyler was rooted in an ancient mistake or failure to distinguish between dreams and reality second Tyler argued that animism
2:49 involved primitive humanity's tendency to falsely assume that inanimate objects were alive Tyler's theory of animism was basically an evolutionary theory of
2:59 religion according to him animism is the first stage in an evolutionary tree of increasing cultural complexity societies first graduate to polytheism then to
3:09 monotheism before reaching the pinnacle of cultural development scientific rationalism for him animism survives in modern religions as a remnant of former
3:19 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
3:29 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
3:36 because of its ethnocentrism and evolutionism first Tyler's theories are untestable as the scholar of religion Russell McCutcheon says we can't invent
3:46 a time machine and interview Paleolithic humans when they wake up from sleep so lacking that evidence Tyler relied on speculation and using
3:55 data from contemporary indigenous cultures evidence like reports from European travelers and especially a book on Zulu religion written by an Anglican
4:04 missionary but this book was written during his lifetime a time of European Christian proselytizing in South Africa traditional African religious
4:13 communities were responding to colonialism sometimes adapting their religious beliefs to Christianity sometimes struggling against them so a
4:21 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
4:32 to indigenous religions video studying contemporary indigenous religion does not equal studying religion as it was 100 thousand years ago
4:39 religions and cultures change so if you want to study Paleolithic cultures you better rely on Paleolithic evidence using the tools of archaeology the
4:49 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
4:56 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
5:04 that was relatively advanced both technologically and scientifically and was overwhelmingly polytheistic which Tyler called a religion characteristic
5:13 of low races same with China very technologically advanced throughout its history and very different from the Christian monotheism of 19th century
5:21 Europe Tyler was making an ethnocentric value judgment based on what he considered was advanced he argued that these tribes were cognitively
5:29 underdeveloped and that they were making childlike mistakes when they ascribed personality to objects or viewed dreams as supernatural visions but modern
5:39 people still have near death experiences visions or dreams and see these experiences as supernatural events now Tyler would call these experiences
5:48 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
5:59 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
6:06 first place so scholars have overwhelmingly rejected Tyler's evolution of religion theory and they generally don't think of animism as the
6:14 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
6:25 relationships with the material and natural world a type of religion that sees personhood in non-human entities like landscape objects and natural
6:34 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
6:44 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
6:52 the native hawaiians view the volcano Mauna Kea as an elder sibling or religions in which particular spirits or personalities can inhabit objects like
7:01 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
7:10 countries like Indonesia and Nigeria have even sought formal recognition as Animists for legal representation in their countries and even though Tyler
7:17 would have called these cultures primitive cultures these are modern religions that are diverse and have changed over time and are just as
7:25 complex as other religious traditions now having said all that scholars do think animism is a useful theory explaining religious belief in practice
7:33 in early humans anthropologists like Stuart Guthrie have argued that humans have evolved a cognitive bias toward animism also called hyperactive agency
7:42 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
7:51 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
8:00 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
8:09 social but extending that social network beyond humans to include landscape animals objects and natural phenomena so I'll admit that this infographic is
8:18 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
8:26 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
8:36 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
8:46 you next time you