Far from supposing religion of some kind to be a cornerstone of all culture, however, he entertained the idea of a pre-religious stage in the evolution of cultures and believed that a tribe in that stage might be found. Theoretical issues Tylor’s theory of animismįor Tylor, the concept of animism was an answer to the question, “What is the most rudimentary form of religion which may yet bear that name?” He had learned to doubt scattered reports of peoples “so low in culture as to have no religious conceptions whatever.” He thought religion was present in all cultures, properly observed, and might turn out to be present everywhere. But what is plain today-that no historically given creed has an inevitable appeal to the educated mind-had scarcely gained a place in scholarly argument more than 100 years ago. There is, however, no ground for supposing that polytheistic and monotheistic ideas were excluded. In societies lacking any doctrinal establishment, a closed system of beliefs was less likely to flourish than an open one. Since the “great” religions of the world have all evolved in historic times, it may be assumed that animistic emphases dominated the globe in the prehistoric era.

The religious ideas of the “Stone Age” hunters interviewed during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have been far from simple. Since at least the mid-20th century, all contemporary cultures and religions have been regarded by anthropologists as comparable in the sense of reflecting a fully evolved human intelligence capable of learning the arts of the most advanced society. Present-day thinkers consider this view to be rooted in a profoundly mistaken premise. To the intellectuals of that time, profoundly affected by Charles Darwin’s new biology, animism seemed a key to the so-called primitive mind-to human intellect at the earliest knowable stage of cultural evolution. It is this interest that was crystallized by Tylor in Primitive Culture, the greater part of which is given over to the description of exotic religious behaviour. While generally unsympathetic to what was regarded as “primitive superstition,” some missionaries in the 19th century developed a scholarly interest in beliefs that seemed to represent an early type of religious creed, inferior but ancestral to their own. After the age of exploration, Europe’s best information on the newly discovered peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania often came from Christian missionaries.

Modern scholarship’s concern with animism is coeval with the problem of rational or scientific understanding of religion itself. The term animism denotes not a single creed or doctrine but a view of the world consistent with a certain range of religious beliefs and practices, many of which may survive in more complex and hierarchical religions. Importance in the study of culture and religion For this reason, an ethnographic understanding of animism, based on field studies of tribal peoples, is no less important than a theoretical one, concerned with the nature or origin of religion. While none of the major world religions are animistic (though they may contain animistic elements), most other religions-e.g., those of tribal peoples-are. Animistic beliefs were first competently surveyed by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his work Primitive Culture (1871), to which is owed the continued currency of the term. Animism, belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.

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