The Invention of Animism

The world's oldest worldview has a curious linguistic problem: it has no native word for itself. The very concept we use to describe it was invented in a Victorian study.

In 1871, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor popularized the term animism in his work Primitive Culture. To Tylor, it served as a neat, broad definition of religion as a belief in spiritual beings. But his framework was built on a rigid evolutionary ladder, placing human civilization on a convenient upward march from savage to civilized.

Under this Western lens, describing indigenous worldviews as animism functioned as a colonial tool. It neatly categorized these perspectives as irrational or primitive, dismissing them from the table of serious thought.

Yet many indigenous languages do not possess a general term for religion or God. Instead, their vocabulary maps out an entirely different architecture of existence. The Zuñi language, for instance, uses the term á-hâ-i to describe the connections between all living things, translating simply to all life.

Today, modern scholars and indigenous writers are engaging in what is called a new animism, attempting to move past these colonial legacies by centering indigenous epistemologies and lived experiences. Even so, tension remains between the historical use of animism as a derogatory label and contemporary efforts to reclaim it.

Language reclamation itself has become a vital decolonial intervention, directly addressing the power structures that caused cultural ruptures in the first place. When a worldview refuses to separate the sacred from the living, trying to capture it in a Victorian category misses the point entirely.