Animism (from Latin anima , "breath, spirit, life") is a religion the belief that objects, places, and beings have different spiritual essences. Potentially, animism sees all things - animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human works and even words - as animated and alive. Animism is the oldest religion in the world, "Animism precedes all organized forms of religion and is said to contain the world's oldest spiritual and supernatural perspectives, from the Paleolithic Age, to the moment when... humans explore the hunting grounds and gather, and communicate with the Spirit of Nature. "
Animism is used in religious anthropology as a term for the belief system of many indigenous peoples, especially in contrast to the relatively recent development of organized religion. Although each culture has its own distinct mythology and rituals, "animism" is said to describe the most common and basic thread from the "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspective of indigenous society. The animistic perspectives are so widely held and adhered to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have the words in their language that correspond to "animism" (or even "religion"); the term is anthropological constructions.
In large part due to such etnolinguistic and cultural differences, opinions differ on whether animism refers to a common mode of ancestor experience common to indigenous peoples around the world, or full religion in its own right. The accepted definition of animism was only developed at the end of the 19th century by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as "one of the earliest anthropological concepts, if not the first".
Animism includes the belief that all material phenomena have the agency of choice, that there is no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical world (or matter) and the soul or spirit or feeling that exists not only in man but also in other animals, plants, stones , geographical features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural environment, including thunder, wind and shadow. Thus animism rejects Cartesian dualism. Animism can further connect the soul with abstract concepts like the correct words, names or metaphors in mythology. Some members of the non-tribal world also consider themselves animists (such as writer Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan and many contemporary pagans).
Video Animism
Theory
old animism
An earlier anthropological perspective, which has since been called "old animism", is concerned with the knowledge of what life is and what factors make things alive. "Old animism" assumes that animists are individuals who can not understand the difference between people and things. Criticism of "old animism" has accused him of maintaining "a worldview and a colonialist and dualist rhetoric".
Definition of Edward Tylor
The idea of ​​animism was developed by anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor in his 1871 Primitive Culture, in which he defined it as "the general doctrine of soul and other spiritual beings in general". According to Tylor, animism often includes "an idea of ​​life and will that lives in nature"; the belief that objects other than humans have souls. The formulation is slightly different from that suggested by Auguste Comte as "fetishism", but the term now has a different meaning.
For Tylor, animism represents the early form of religion, which lies within the evolutionary framework of religion that has gradually developed and which will ultimately lead to the humanity that rejects religion altogether for scientific rationality. Thus, for Tylor, animism is fundamentally seen as a mistake, the basic error from which all religions grow. He does not believe that animism is inherently absurd, but he suggests that animism arises from the dreams and visions of early humans and thus a rational system. However, it is based on false, unscientific observations of the nature of reality. Stringer notes that his reading of Primitive Culture makes him believe that Tylor is much more sympathetic in relation to the "primitive" population than many of his contemporaries and that Tylor states there is no belief that there is a difference between the intellectual abilities of the "savage" and Western people.
Tylor initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as "spiritualism" but realized that it would cause confusion with the modern religion of Spiritualism, then become prevalent in Western countries. He adopted the term "animism" from the writings of German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl, who, in 1708, has developed the term
The idea that there was once "a universal form of primitive religion" (whether labeled "animism", "totemism", or "shamanism") has been dismissed as "unsophisticated" and "erroneous" by archaeologist Timothy Insoll, who states that "it removes complexity , current religious prerequisites, in all variants ".
Social-evolutionist conception
The definition of Tylor animism is part of a growing international debate about the nature of "primitive societies" by lawyers, theologians, and philologists. The debate defines the field of research of new science: anthropology. By the end of the nineteenth century, orthodoxy about "primitive societies" had emerged, but some anthropologists would still accept the definition. The "anthropologists of the 19th century chairs" argue "primitive societies" (evolutionary categories) are ordered by kinship and divided into exogamous offspring associated with a series of marriage exchanges. Their religion is animism, the belief that species and natural objects have souls. With the development of private property, the descendant groups are displaced by the emergence of a territorial state. These rituals and beliefs eventually evolved over time into the various "developing" religions. According to Tylor, the more advanced a society is scientifically, the fewer members of society who believe in animism. However, the remnants of the soul or spirit ideology, for Tylor, represent the "remnants" of the original genuine human animism.
In 1869 (three years after Tylor proposed the definition of animism), Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLennan argued that the obvious animistic thought in fetishism gave rise to a religion he named Totemism. Primitive people believe, he argues, that they are descended from the same species as their totemic animals. The ensuing debates by 'seat anthropologists' (including J. J. Bachofen, Durkheim and Sigmund Freud) continue to focus on totemism rather than animism, with some directly challenging Tylor's definition. Indeed, anthropologists "have generally avoided the problem of Animism and even the term itself rather than reviewing this general notion with respect to their new and rich ethnography."
According to anthropologist Tim Ingold, animism shares a resemblance to totemism but differs in focus to individual spirit beings that help perpetuate life, whereas totemism is more typical of the existence of a primary source, such as the land itself or the ancestor, which provides the basis of life. Certain indigenous groups such as Australian Aborigines are usually more totem, while others like the Inuit are more animistic in their worldview.
From his studies to child development, Jean Piaget suggested that children are born with an innate animist world view where they are anthropomorphized inanimate objects, and that only then they grow out of this belief. On the contrary, from her ethnographic research, Margaret Mead argues otherwise, believing that children are not born with an animistic worldview but that they become acculturated with such beliefs when they are educated by their society. Stewart Guthrie sees animism - or "attribution" as he pleases - as an evolutionary strategy to help survival. He argues that both humans and other animal species see inanimate objects as potentially life as a means of constantly alert to potential threats. His suggested explanation, however, does not deal with the question of why such a belief becomes the center of religion.
In 2000, Guthrie suggested that the "broadest" concept of animism was that of "the attribution of spirits to natural phenomena such as rocks and trees".
New animism
Many anthropologists stop using the term "animism", assuming it is too close to early anthropological theory and religious polemics. However, the term has also been claimed by religious groups - namely indigenous communities and worshipers of nature - who feel that it best describes their own beliefs, and which in some cases are actively identified as "animists". Therefore it is read back by various scholars, but they begin to use the term in different ways, putting a focus on knowing how to behave towards others, some of which are not human. As the study of religious scholars Graham Harvey has observed, while the definition of "old animism" has been problematic, the term "animism" is somehow "highly valued as a critical and academic term for the religious and cultural styles associated with the world."
"New animism" emerged largely from the publication of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, produced on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Canadian Ojibwe community in the mid-20th century. For Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood does not require human likeness, but human beings are considered like others, who for example include rock and bear people. For Ojibwe, these people are any deliberate creatures who gain meaning and power through their interactions with others; through good interaction with others, they themselves learn to "act as a person". Hallowell's approach to Ojibwe's personality understanding is very different from the anthropological concepts of animism before. He emphasized the need to challenge the modernist Western perspective about what it is by entering into dialogue with different worldviews.
The Hallowell approach influenced the work of anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, which produced a scientific article that reassessed animist ideas in 1999. Seven comments from other academics were given in the journal, debating the idea of ​​Bird-David.
Recently, post modern anthropologists have become increasingly involved with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by the dualism of Cartesian subjects that divide the subjective from the objectives, and the culture of nature; in this view, Animism is the opposite of saintism, and therefore inherently invalid. Referring to the work of Bruno Latour, these anthropologists question these modernist assumptions, and theorize that all societies continue to "live" the world around them, and not merely as the Tylorian survival of primitive thinking. In contrast, the instrumental reason for the characteristics of modernity is limited to our "professional subculture", which allows us to treat the world as a separate mechanical object within the scope of limited activity. We, like animism, also continue to create personal relationships with elements called the objective world, whether pets, cars, or teddy bears, which we recognize as subjects. Thus, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than inert objects perceived by modernists." These approaches are careful to avoid the modernist assumptions that the environment is made up of a different physical world than humans, and from the modernist conception of the dualistically arranged body as body and soul.
Nurit Bird-David argues that "Positivistic ideas about the meanings of 'nature', 'life' and 'personality' misrepresent the earlier attempts to understand local concepts.The classical (disputed) theorists have linked modernist ideas to self they themselves with 'primitive people' while asserting that 'primitive peoples' read their ideas about themselves to others! "He argues that animism is a" relational epistemology ", and not a Tylorian failure of primitive reasoning. That is, the identity of the animist is based on their relationship with others, rather than some characteristic of the self. Instead of focusing on the essentialist and modernist self (the "individual"), people are seen as a collection of social relationships ("dividers"), some of them with "superpersons" (ie non-humans).
Guthrie expressed his criticism of Bird-David's attitude toward animism, believing that he expressed the view that "the world of any size made by our local imagination". This, he feels, will lead to anthropology leaving behind a "scientific project".
Ingold's team, like Bird-David, argue that the animists do not see themselves as separate from their environment: "Hunter-gatherers do not, as a rule, approach their environment as external worlds that must be 'grasped' intellectually. mind and nature have no place in their thinking and practice. "Willerslev expands the argument by claiming that the animist rejects this Cartesian dualism, and that the animist identifies himself with the world," feeling instantly in and separated from it so that both glide incessantly in and out of each other on closed circuits. "Animist hunters thus realize themselves as human hunters, but, through mimicry can assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensitivity of its prey, become one with it. Shamanism, in this view, is a daily effort to influence the spirits of ancestors and animals by imitating their behavior as hunters performing their prey.
Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram articulates and describes the highly ethical and ecological forms of animism based on the phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books Being a Beast and Sensuous Mantra Abram asserts that material things are never entirely passive in our immediate experience, holding something that is considered to be active " our attention "or" call our focus, "inducing a sensitive body into sustained participation with those things. In the absence of intervening technology, the sensory experience is essentially animistic, revealing a living material field and organizing itself from scratch. Based on cognitive knowledge and contemporary science, as well as on the perspective of a diverse, indigenous cultural perspective, Abram proposed a rich pluralist and story-based cosmology, in which matter lived through and through. Such an ontology is very appropriate, he says, with our spontaneous perceptual experience; it will draw us back to our senses and to the primacy of the sensual field, ordering a more respectful and ethical relationship with animal communities, plants, soil, mountains, waters, and more humane weather patterns that sustain us materially.. In contrast to the old trends in Western social sciences, which usually provide a rational explanation of animist experience, Abram developed an animistic explanation of reason itself. He argues that the civilized reason is sustained only by the highly animistic participation between humans and their own written signs. Indeed, as soon as we turn our eyes to the alphabet letters written on pages or screens, these letters speak to us - we 'see what they say' - just as ancient trees and rivers emit and mossy moss-encrusted talking to our oral ancestors. Reading, therefore, is a highly concentrated form of animism, effectively disrupting all other forms of participation, older, and more spontaneous in which we have been involved. "To tell the story in this way - to give an explanation of the reasons for animism, not the other way around - is to imply that animism is a broader and more inclusive term, and that the mode of oral experience, the underlying mimesis, and the support of all our literate reflection modes letters and technologists.When deep-rooted reflections in experiential and participatory modes of experience are totally unrecognized or unconscious, the reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, inadvertently destroying the worldly, sensuous world that sustains it. "
Graham Harvey's religious studies scholar defines animism as a belief "that the world is full of people, only some of which are human, and that life always lives in relationships with others". He added that it is therefore "concerned by learning how to be a good person in a respectful relationship with others". Graham Harvey, in his 2013 Handbook of Contemporary Animism, identifies an animist perspective that goes along with Martin Buber "Saya-Thou" as opposed to "I-it". Thus, Harvey says, the Animist takes I-thou's approach to connecting with his world, where objects and animals are treated as "you" rather than as "it".
Maps Animism
Religion
There is an ongoing disagreement (and there is no general consensus) about whether animism is only a single or widespread religious belief that includes a worldview within and from itself, composed of many diverse mythologies found throughout the world in many diverse cultures. It also raises controversy over ethical claims that may be animistic or improper: whether animism ignores ethical questions altogether or, by giving various non-human elements of nature with spirituality or personality, actually promotes complex ecological ethics.
Fetishism/totemism
In many animistic worldviews, humans are often regarded as more or less equal footing with animals, plants, and other natural forces.
Shamanism
A dukun is a person deemed to have access to, and influence, the world of evil spirits and evil, who usually enter a trance state during rituals, and perform predictions and healings. According to Mircea Eliade, shamanism includes the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit world. Shamans are said to treat illness/disease by improving the soul. Reducing the trauma that affects the soul/spirit restores the individual's physical body to balance and wholeness. Shamans also enter the supernatural realm or dimension to find solutions to the problems that afflict society. Shamans can visit other worlds/dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to correct the psychiatric illness caused by foreign elements. Shamans mainly operate in the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. Restoration of balance results in the elimination of disease. Abram, however, articulates a less supernatural and far more ecological understanding of the dukun's role than Eliade puts it. Based on his own fieldwork in Indonesia, Nepal, and America, Abram pointed out that in animism culture, shamans function primarily as an intermediary between human communities and more active agent communities than humans - local animals, plants and landscapes (mountains, rivers, , wind and weather patterns, all of which are felt to have their own special features). Therefore the ability of healers to heal individual instances of discomfort (or imbalance) in human communities is a by-product of a more sustainable practice of balancing reciprocity between the broader human and collective community of the living beings in which the community is embedded.
Differences from pantheism
Animism is not the same as pantheism, though both are sometimes confusing. Some religions are pantheistic and animistic. One major difference is that while animists believe everything is spiritual, they do not always see the spiritual nature of everything that exists as a monism, as the pantheist does. As a result, animism is more emphasis on the uniqueness of each soul. In pantheism, all have the same spiritual essence, rather than having different spirits and/or souls.
Example
- Mun, (also called Munism or Bongthingism) is the polytheistic, animist, shamanistic, and traditional syncretic religion of the Lepcha people.
- The New Age movements usually show the animist nature in asserting the existence of the natural spirits. Some Neopagan groups, including Eco-Pagans, describe themselves as animists, meaning that they respect the diverse community of living beings and spirits with whom humans share the cosmos.
Animistic life
Animals, plants and elements
Animism entails the belief that "all living things have souls", and thus the main concern of animist thought surrounds how animals can be eaten or used for human subsistence needs. Non-human animal actions are seen as "deliberate, planned and purposed", and they are understood as people because they live and communicate with others. In an animist world view, non-human beings are understood to participate in kinship and ceremonial systems with humans, as well as having their own kinship and ritual system. Harvey cites examples of animism's understanding of animal behavior that occurred in powwows held by the Conne Mi'kmaq River in 1996; an eagle flying over the trial, circling above the middle drum group. Participants gathered to summon kitit ("eagles"), conveyed welcome to the birds and expressed pleasure in their beauty, and they then articulated the view that the eagle's actions reflected his approval of the event and Mi' kmaq returned to spiritual practice traditional.
Some animists also view the life of plants and fungi as human beings and interact with them. The most common encounter between humans and the people of these plants and fungi is by the last collection for food, and for the animist this interaction should normally be done with respect. Harvey cites the example of the Maori community in New Zealand, who often offer the karili call to sweet potato as they dig the latter; while doing so there is awareness of the familial relationship between Maori and sweet potato, with both understood to have arrived at Aotearoa together in the same canoe. In another example, animists believe that interaction with people of plants and fungi can result in communication of things that are unknown or even otherwise unknowable. Among some modern pagans, for example, the relationship is cultivated with certain trees, which are understood to provide physical knowledge or gifts, such as flowers, sap, or wood that can be used as firewood or for fashion to become a stick; in return, these Gentiles make offerings to the tree itself, which can come in the form of offerings from mead or ale, a drop of blood from a finger, or a wool.
Various animist cultures are also understood as stone as people. Discussing the work of ethnography conducted among Ojibwe, Harvey notes that their society generally considers stones as inanimate objects, but with two major exceptions: the rocks of Bell Rocks and the rocks lying beneath the trees are struck by lightning, which is understood to have become Thunderers own. Ojibwe understands the weather as a creature capable of personality, with a storm conceived as a person known as 'Thunder' whose voice conveys communication and is involved in seasonal conflicts over lakes and forests, throwing lightning into lake monsters. Wind, equally, can be understood as someone in animistic thought.
The importance of space is also a recurring element of animism, with some places understood as people who have their own right.
Spirits
Animism can also involve relationships built with non-corporeal spirit entities.
Other uses
Science and animism
At the beginning of the 20th century, William McDougall defended the form of Animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defense of Animism (1911).
Physicist Nick Herbert argues for "quantum animism" in which the mind penetrates the world at every level.
The assumption of quantum awareness, which amounts to a kind of "quantum animism" also asserts that consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not the property arising from biological systems or special computations. Since everything in the world is at a certain level of quantum system, this assumption requires that all become conscious at that level. If the world is truly quantum animation, then there are innumerable invisible inner experiences going on around us that are currently inaccessible to humans, because our own inner lives are imprisoned in small quantum systems, isolated deep within the flesh of a brain animals.
Werner Krieglstein writes of his quantum animism:
Herbert's quantum animism differs from traditional Animism in that it avoids the assumption of the dualistic model of thought and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some types of spirits inhabit the body and make it move, the ghost inside the machine. Herbert's quantum animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner, conscious center of life, from which it directs and observes its action.
Socio-political impact
Harvey argues that the animistic view of personality represents a radical challenge to the dominant perspectives of modernity, for it provides "intelligence, rationality, consciousness, willingness, agency, intentionality, language and desire" to non-humans. Similarly, he challenges the unique view of humanity in both Abrahamic religions and Western rationalism.
In art and literature
Animistic beliefs can also be expressed through artwork. For example, among the Maori community in New Zealand, there is the recognition that creating art through wood or stone carvings requires violence against wooden or stone people, and that those who are damaged must therefore be soothed and respected during the process; any excess or waste from the creation of artwork is returned to the ground, while the artwork itself is treated with special respect. Therefore, Harvey argues that the creation of art among the Maori is not about creating inanimate objects for display, but the transformation of different people in a relationship.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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