Animism

The word animism was coined at the outset of anthropology, to describe certain practices of human groups called “primitive cultures.” Primitive cultures were often observed from a critical distance. Thus, they were different from other cultures, the civilized. Under scrutiny by anthropologists, the former were measured according to the historical progression of human development whose culmination was embodied by the way of life of Western Europe’s peoples towards the end of the 19th century. Following this progression, the primitive peoples lagged behind in respect to the Europeans, living in their present time the past of the latter: while in Europe, great cities and steam engines were built, the primitive were in their cognitive and productive infancy. In this sense, the primitive weren’t as human as the observers: they were subaltern, incomplete, marginal humans, deprived from the tools of modern technology. These “lesser” humans were typically defined with characteristics antithetical to those of their observer: unmodern, unscholarly, deprived of civilizational gadgets, non-metropolitan residents. They typically weren’t aware of the ontological distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the living and the inanimate, and therefore had no devices to account for the “world.” They couldn’t tell feeling from thinking either. [...]

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