Abstract

Animistic religious thought is extremely widespread, and can be found even in religions practiced by “modern” societies. But it is commonly thought to bear the hallmarks of “primitive” thinking processes, which in the anthropological tradition have typically been taken to involve various cognitive errors. Here I am going to argue that this misunderstands and misrepresents the content of such thinking, which is by no means as unsophisticated as it is usually considered to be. I shall be using Robin Horton’s interesting proposals as my stalking-horse.