On AnimismAuthor(s): Stewart GuthrieReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 1 (February 2000), pp. 106-107Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/300107 .Accessed: 07/11/2012 12:49

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Discussion and Criticism

On Animism

stewart guthrieDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, FordhamUniversity, New York, N.Y. 10023, U.S.A. 13 v 99

Bird-David (40:S67–91) addresses an enduring issue inanthropology, one which, as she notes, goes back at leastto Tylor. Her article is timely, coinciding with a recentmultidisciplinary revival of interest in theory of religion.It also raises the interesting and important questionwhether we imagine we have social relations with non-human things and events because we animate them or,as she mostly thinks, animate them because we haverelations with them.

There are a few problems as well. The first is in theopening assertion that Western scholars are univocal intheir conception of animism. This conception, Bird-Da-vid writes, has not changed since Tylor formulated it;thus Tylor’s successors continue to wear his 19th-cen-tury Western blinders. In fact, however, conceptions ofanimism vary considerably (as Palsson’s comment alsonotes [pp. S83–84]). Tylor, for example, said that animism(for him, belief in spirit beings) is what all religions share.In contrast, the conception of animism that is now mostwidespread (attribution of spirits to natural phenomenasuch as stones and trees) makes animism only one formof religion. A third conception of animism, adopted byPiaget and most subsequent developmental psycholo-gists, is the attribution of life to the lifeless. This con-ception includes no spirit beings at all. Thus if Bird-David’s project is to remove our ethnocentric blinders,she faces not one set but several.

Another issue is that Bird-David promises a “solution”regarding animism but does not say clearly what problemwill be solved. This may be because a clear statementof the apparent underlying problem—why people ani-mate the inanimate—would undercut the article’s the-sis, that animism is as valid intellectually as non-ani-mism. The question why we see lifeless things andevents as alive appears, by the dichotomy it poses, in-compatible with Bird-David’s postmodernism; yet it re-mains a question. Bird-David doubts that dichotomy but,instead of showing its inadequacy, merely dismisses itas modernist. At the same time, she admits that humansdo have a “tendency to animate things.”

Bird-David promises close attention to four earlier the-orists but misreads two of them. Tylor, she says, labelsindigenous people “delirious” because it is dreams thatinspire their animism. Actually, Tylor claims not only

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dreams but also, and equally, death as features of theexistential puzzle that animism answers. Nor does hemean by animism a particular form of religion; that isthe innovation of later writers. Rather, animism for Tyloris (as noted) the core of all religion. Most important,Tylor depicts people as rational, not delirious, in invok-ing spirits as an explanatory principle. Indeed, a standardcomplaint against Tylor is that he pictures people asmore rational than they are.

Bird-David misreads my work (Guthrie 1993) as well.First, probably because she conflates varying views ofanimism, she writes that I go “some way toward sub-stantiating” Tylor’s view. In fact, I advance a view thatundermines Tylorian animism. Second, I do not derogate,as she writes, indigenous understandings. If I were toderogate anyone’s animism, it would be everyone’s. In-stead, I describe animism as the by-product of an inher-ently good and necessary strategic practice: in a percep-tual version of Pascal’s Wager, we interpret the world’spervasive ambiguities as signs of life and humanity. Fur-ther, I emphasize material from the contemporary West,not from indigenes. Finally, Bird-David contrasts my ap-proach with what she sees as her own idea of “sociallybiased cognitive skills” (p. S78). Actually, I argue ex-plicitly that humans are biased to see the world as social.

Bird-David’s central claim is that “relational” episte-mologies (those that assume that the relevant objects inone’s environment are persons, whether or not they alsoare hills or trees) are as coherent and defensible as non-relational ones because they focus people’s attention onsuch objects and thus help them acquire information.Cast in an exotic locale among hunter-gatherers, thisfunctionalist notion has a certain appeal. We can imaginethat we would ourselves, as Nayaka, look more intentlyat an environment we thought composed of cryptic butsociable devaru than at one we thought deserted. We alsocan imagine that our resulting close attention would berepaid by a more intimate knowledge. Moreover, thissociable world, founded on “sharing,” appears attrac-tively ethical.

However, if we bring this epistemology (or ontology)home to a more familiar industrial society, its plausi-bility diminishes. “Recognizing a ‘conversation’ with acounter-being—which amounts to accepting it into fel-lowship” (p. S78)—is less promising when the counter-being is a car, computer, or any of the myriad other ar-tifacts that even we moderns animate. Much as we mayshare ourselves with our machines—as when we expressour feelings to a stalled car or to a locked-up com-puter—we are mistaken if we expect fellowship or a con-versation in return. Far from revealing intimate truths,animating our machinery not infrequently leads to in-appropriate behavior—kicking it, for instance, instead ofchanging a fuse.

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Bird-David, however, finds animism worthwhile evenin industrial society. When “we animate the computerswe use, the plants we grow, and the cars we drive . . . welearn what they do in relation to what we do, how theyrespond to our behavior, how they act toward us . . . weget to know these animated things by focusing on ourrelatedness with them” (p. S78). By ascribing a fictivequality to things, that is, we relate to them, and by fo-cusing on that relationship we know both it and themwith special insight.

It seems to me, however, that what we thus knowcould better be described as fantasy than as insight. Docars “act” toward us? I do not believe it. The claim before

us is that the world is in large measure whatever ourlocal imagination makes it. But to make local imagi-nation the arbiter of what exists is to abandon the sci-entific project, and with it a considerable part of theanthropological one.

References Citedb i r d - d a v i d , n . 1999. “Animism” revisited: Personhood, envi-

ronment, and relational epistemology. current anthropology40:S67–S91.

g u t h r i e , s . 1993. Faces in the clouds: A new theory of relig-ion. New York: Oxford University Press.

p a l s s o n , g . 1999. Comment on: “Animism” revisited, by N.Bird-David. current anthropology 40:S83–S84.