Animism

In Tylor's original formulation, animism was an argument for the universality of human intellectual and spiritual worlds. The universality of concepts of souls, and hence the universality of religion, is a major contribution of Tylor, one that endures into the twenty-first century. Like the Canelos Quichua, humans everywhere, in one way or another, and with very great differences, conceptualize into cultural systems the spiritual dimensions of life, as well as the corporeal aspects of quotidian existence. With this concept of universalism of fundamental religious thought, Victorian England and the rest of the English-lettered world was exposed to cultural relativism.

What constitutes human difference in economy, society, psychology, and religion, then, is cultural, not biological. Although people are very "different" from one another, across space and through time, their mental capacities—cognitive, emotional, and imaginative—are not. As Clifford Geertz puts it: "The doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind, which so far as I am aware, is not seriously questioned by any reputable anthropologist, is but the direct contradictory of the primitive mentality argument" (p. 62).

Tylor, however, very much the Victorian gentleman, began his quest for the bases of animism with what he called the "lower races," whom he also labeled "savages," "rude, non-religious tribes," and "tribes very low in the scale of humanity," among other such figures of speech that link evolutionary biology and culture, thereby enforcing the "primitive mentality argument" later expanded by Lucien Lévi-Bruhl in Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910; translated in 1996 as How Natives Think). The Victorian contradiction of enlightened cultural relativity, attached to a scalar view of humans as evolving from the "lower races" to the "civilized nations," leads to the racist paradox that a few civilizations evolved while the rest of the world's people "remained" animist. Animism, by this reasoning, is evidence of low-level "relics." This contradiction became canonized by the sixteenth century through the emergence of Western modernity and mercantilist capitalism and remains strong in twenty-first-century Western cosmology.

It is, however, a fallacy. Every religious system, including the monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam, include representations of the supernatural with strong animistic dimensions. Despite religious scholars' assertions to the contrary, members of monotheistic religions nonetheless act at times as though there are spiritual beings detached from corporeal beings, manifest concern over the fate of their immortal souls, and make these beliefs part of their traditions, such as the jinn of Middle Eastern folklore, or of the dominant religion itself.

Nonetheless, the enduring Victorian contradiction between cultural relativity and social evolution continues to cast a shadow over the religious beliefs of indigenous peoples, leading many of the world's people with rich beliefs in spirits and noncorporeal essences of animate and inanimate things—but without a "high god" organizer—to resent the concept animist because of its connotation of savagery. Among the Canelos Quichua, for example, spokespeople to the outside world often express considerable resentment at the use of the word.

By the same token, animist symbolism does more than establish a template for understanding quotidian life and the universe. It also undergirds the ideological struggles of indigenous people to establish a place and space in nation-state life. In Amazonian Ecuador, for example, animistic concepts were utilized during political uprisings in 1990 and 1992, and again in 2000, when indigenous people rose up as one mighty body to claim—in part successfully—their territory and their rights. Animism as a concept is very powerful in its relativistic dimensions, but is destructive when used to place people in a universal or particular evolutionary scheme that ranges from primitive to civilized.