Abstract

Animism as an anthropological concept was launched by British evolutionary anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), whose two-volume book Primitive Culture (1871) was extremely influential for over three decades in Britain and beyond. Tylor’s ideas were followed by armchair anthropologists, folklorists and other scholars interested in comparing “savagery” to “civilization”, and they also affected the accounts of ethnographers describing ritual and belief among so-called “primitive peoples”. The high repute of Tylor’s work in the late nineteenth century contrasts sharply with the rejection of his theoretical principles by contemporary anthropologists participating in the reinvention of the concept of animism, as if the reinvention itself depended on demarcating the novel from the “dubious” or “questionable” uses of the word in the past (Descola, 2013: 129; Bird-David, 1999: S67). The expressions “old animism” and “new animism” are frequently employed to prevent any possible confusion between the two periods of disciplinary history, all the more so as most anthropologists throughout the twentieth century had neglected animism because of its evolutionist connotations, and “largely ignored the term itself” (Stringer, 2015: 551; see Bird-David, 1999: S68).