4 - Animism for Tylor

Summary

This essay is an admittedly roundabout way of presenting E. B. Tylor's view of animism. I confine myself to that task and do not evaluate his view or consider the supposedly “new” animism. I look at animism, which is Tylor's term for religion per se, as a typically nineteenth-century theory of religion. For me, the key question is whether for Tylor animism can still exist in the modern world and, if so, in what form.

I have regularly contrasted nineteenth-century theories of religion to twentieth-century ones. In the nineteenth century, I have argued, religion was assumed to arise to serve the same need as science, which was taken to be a largely, even an exclusively, modern enterprise. In fact, “modern” and “scientific” were synonyms. The nineteenth-century view is epitomized by the theories of not only Tylor, the first edition of whose Primitive Culture appeared in 1871, but also J. G. Frazer, the first edition of whose The Golden Bough appeared in 1890. Both assume that religion arises and functions either to explain (Tylor) or to control (Frazer) the physical world. Religion is the “primitive” counterpart to either scientific theory (Tylor) or applied science (Frazer).

Where Tylor focuses on religious beliefs, Frazer focuses on religious practices, or rituals. For both, religion ascribes all physical events in the world to either a decision by a god (Tylor) or the effect on the world of the physical state of the god (Frazer).