Animism is the belief that a spiritual essence inhabits not only human beings but also animals, plants, rivers, hills, stones and the dead. E. B. Tylor made it the cornerstone of the first systematic anthropology of religion, defining it as the belief in spiritual beings and proposing it as the minimum definition of religion — the irreducible core present wherever religion is found at all. In an animist world the boundary between person and thing is porous: a tree may be addressed, a mountain propitiated, an ancestor consulted.
Where it comes from
Tylor reconstructed animism as an inference drawn by early humans from ordinary experience. Dreams, visions, shadows and death suggested that something separable from the body departs and returns; the idea of a soul, once formed for humans, was extended by analogy to the rest of nature. From this beginning he traced an evolutionary sequence — animism giving way to polytheism, polytheism to monotheism — with religion advancing as thought grew more abstract. The scheme was intellectualist: religion originated as a mistaken but reasonable theory about the world.
How it works
As a descriptive category animism identifies a pattern of practice rather than a doctrine. Spirits are numerous, local and specific, tied to particular groves, fields or lineages; they are managed through offerings, sacrifice, divination and the mediation of a shaman or priest-healer rather than through congregational worship or scripture. Sacred sites are places, not buildings, and obligations follow kinship and territory.
Points of debate
Marett objected that a diffuse impersonal power, mana, precedes any belief in souls, and named this earlier stage animatism. Durkheim’s objection was sharper: Tylor makes religion an illusion born of error, which cannot explain why it endured or why it divides the world into sacred and profane rather than merely peopling it with spirits. Critics also note the colonial career of the term: the Indian censuses of the late nineteenth century classified tribal populations as Animist, a residual label. Ghurye contested such separation, reading tribal religion as continuous with popular Hinduism, while others insisted on its distinctness.
For the UPSC answer
Define animism as belief in spiritual beings, credit Tylor with the minimum definition and the evolutionary sequence, and then dispose of it with Marett on animatism and Durkheim on the sacred. Add the Indian census usage to show how the category served administrative rather than sociological ends.
References & further reading
- Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture. John Murray.
- Marett, R. R. (1909). The Threshold of Religion. Methuen.
- Durkheim, E. (1912). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.