What is Animism?
Animism is the belief that all entities carry spirit, agency, or personhood. Animals and humans are not the only beings with inner lives. Plants, rivers, rocks, mountains, and weather systems are also participants in a living world. The term comes from the Latin anima, meaning breath or soul.
Animism vs adjacent concepts
Animism is often paired with shamanism, but they are different things. Animism is a worldview: a way of understanding what the world is made of. Shamanism is a role within that world, in which a trained practitioner negotiates with the spirit community on behalf of others. Most shamanic traditions assume an animistic frame, but an animistic worldview does not require shamans. Animism also differs from pantheism, which holds that the universe itself is a single divine being. Animism distributes spirit across many distinct entities rather than identifying the cosmos as one unified god. Unlike polytheism, which centres on named deities with cults and narratives, animism extends spirit or personhood to beings that are not formally worshipped: the fox, the oak, the river, recognised simply as persons.
The word and its history
The British anthropologist E. B. Tylor introduced animism as a technical term in Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor defined it as 'the belief in spiritual beings' and argued it was the earliest stage of religion, the base from which polytheism and monotheism later developed. This evolutionary model shaped anthropology for decades. Modern scholars have mostly discarded it. The hierarchy Tylor implied, with 'primitive' animism at the bottom and monotheism at the top, reflected the colonial assumptions of nineteenth-century Europe more than anything about religion itself. Animism is no longer treated as a relic. It is treated as a living worldview with its own logic.
New animism
In 2005 the religious studies scholar Graham Harvey proposed 'new animism' as a reframing. Where Tylor was interested in belief, in what animists think about the world, Harvey focused on practice: how animists relate to the world. The shift is from asking what people believe exists to asking how people engage with what they encounter. The world is not described as containing spirits. It is encountered as a community of persons, each with their own life and standing. This relational reading has shaped how contemporary scholars approach Lakota tradition, Australian Aboriginal spirituality, and many other indigenous cosmologies.
Animism in the index
Animism as a worldview underlies much of what this index covers, even when the word does not appear. The shamanism entry examines one of its most studied practical expressions. The Lakota tradition entry describes a living example: the concept of wakȟáŋ, the sacred power the tradition sees as present throughout the world, is an animistic idea at its core. Taoism shares a relational cosmology, in which the Tao permeates and animates all things without being a personal deity. The soul entry traces how different traditions attribute inner life, including to non-human beings. The broader question of what counts as a person, a live issue in consciousness studies, returns to the same ground animism has always occupied.
Scholarly disagreement
There is ongoing debate about whether animism is a useful category. Some scholars argue it groups too many distinct traditions under one label. The Shinto relationship with kami, the Yoruba relationship with orisha, and the Aboriginal Australian relationship with the Dreaming are so different that naming them all 'animism' may obscure more than it reveals. Others argue the category captures something real: a family of resemblances in how certain traditions relate to the non-human world. The debate has not been settled.