'Animist Materialism':

Collapsing the Tylorian Concept of Animism as a Spiritualist Religion

Anna Preston

1

Eerste Ringdijkstraat 638

1097BC, Amsterdam

Student number: 10619275

Email: enantiodromia8@gmail.com

Introduction'Animism' is a rich and fertile word with relevant connections

to many of religious studies' most fundamental questions: the

difference between 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'matter' and

'spirit', divine immanence and the disenchantment of the world.

Animism may be described as a 'cosmotheistic' worldview, in contrast

to the 'disenchanted' view of the world as propounded by Max Weber in

his famous thesis. The term has been used in very different ways over

the years, so a very general definition will suffice for

introduction. Harry Garuba, in his 'Explorations in Animist

Materialism', gives a sufficiently flexible summary; animism is an

“umbrella designation for a mode of religious consciousness that is

often as elastic as the user is willing to stretch it.” The rest of

his explanation is worth quoting for its succinct quality:

Perhaps the single most important characteristic of animist thought—in contrast to the major monotheistic religions—is its almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits. […] Instead of erecting graven images to symbolize the spiritual being, animist thought spiritualizes the object world, thereby giving the spirit a local habitation. Within the phenomenal world, nature and its

2

objects are endowed with a spiritual life both simultaneous and coterminous with their natural properties.1

For the purposes of this essay, it may be helpful to distinguish

between at least two basic species of animism: the organic animism of

indigenous cultures, and anthropologists' own theoretical

interpretation of that animism. This essay will focus mainly on the

latter category, specifically on how the anthropologists' idea of

animism has shifted and transformed over the years. As other scholars

have not failed to notice, “A diversity of animisms exists, each

animistic project with its local status, history, and structure […]

There follow intriguing questions deserving study, for example: How

does hunter- gatherer animism compare with the current radical

environmental discourses […] that some scholars have described as the

'new animism'?”2 To this I would add: is this ecologically-minded

'new animism' just another 'New Age' 're-enchantment paradigm'? Does

this make it unworthy of serious philosophical consideration?

The answer given in this essay is no—the 'new animism' is just

as worthy of analysis as the original anthropological view that has

had such a profound and lasting impact on modern scholarship.

'Animism' was first established as a scholarly concept by Edward

Burnett Tylor—the founding figure of anthropology. The original

formulation of 'animism' as conceived by Tylor, ripe though it was

for the nascent study of anthropology, is inadequate for today—yet it

1 Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing Africa Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture, 15(2) (2003): 267.

2 Nurit Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. S1, Special Issue Culture—A SecondChance? (1999): S79.

3

continues to exert an influence on how we view the difference between

modern and 'primitive' cultures' religious experience. 'New animism'

perspectives challenge the Tylorian view, and offer valuable insights

into the questions hinted at above. The structure of this essay is as

follows: first, an overview of 'animism' as it was originally

conceived by Tylor, followed by a brief critique of the concept's

most obvious points of failing; then, an introduction to one example

of the 'new animism', followed by a series of explorations into how

it answers the question of disenchantment; finally, it will take a

critical look at whether this 'new animism' really holds up to

scrutiny, and what problems it may have.

Tylor's original 'animism'

Edward Burnett Tylor was the foundational figure in the

establishment of social anthropology as a discipline. His book,

Primitive Culture, was hugely influential to the development of the

field, and this is where he first laid out his theory of 'animism'.

First and foremost, he argued, animism is an essentially spiritualist

religion. Religion exists in all cultures along a continuum from

“lower” to “higher” forms, and animism represents the lowest and most

fundamental form. He divides animism into “two great dogmas”: first,

that souls of individual creatures are capable of continued existence

after the death or destruction of the body; i.e. “The notion of a

ghost-soul animating man while in the body, and appearing in dream

and vision out of the body”3; second, that other spirits also exist, 3 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,

Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (first ed. 1871) (New York: Harper & Brothers 1958,

4

upward to the rank of powerful deities; “Spiritual beings are held to

affect or control the events of the material world, and man's life

here and hereafter.”4 He defines animism as “the deep-lying doctrine

of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of

Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy.”5 Tylor's

animism is posited as the opposite of materialism, and as “the

groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion.”6 The idea of

disenchantment had not been formulated yet at the time of his

writing, but clearly the problem was already recognized: “In our own

day and country, the notion of souls of beasts is seen to be dying

out. Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and

concentrating itself on its first and main position, the doctrine of

the human soul.”7 These leftover remnants of humanity's instinctive

animism he called “survivals,” which was basically another word for

'superstitions'.

From the perspective of today's scholarship, it is easy to pick

apart Tylor's more blatant assumptions about the nature of

“primitive” culture and religion. Despite his repeated insistence

that “savages” should not be judged as irrational, and that animism

was a “rational primitive philosophy,”8 he nonetheless comes across

as extremely dismissive of the animistic perspective. This is evident

in statements such as “[...] men still act as though in some half-

vol. II), 83.4 Ibid. 10.5 Ibid. 9.6 Ibid. 10.7 Ibid. 85.8 Ibid. 12.

5

meant way they believed in souls or ghosts of objects, while

nevertheless their knowledge of physical science is beyond so crude a

philosophy.”9 He also includes a very obvious evolutionist

teleological bias as part of the foundation of his theory, that

religion has 'progressed' from animism to the 'higher' forms of

religion found in the modern world. Tylor gives animism as an

instance of “Natural Religion,” i.e. religion “devised by human

reason, without supernatural aid or revelation,”10 and this betrays

his implicit acceptance of a 'higher' or 'supernatural' divine realm

from which such 'true' revelation can come. His claim that “The

conception of the human soul is, as to its most essential nature,

continuous from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of the

modern professor of theology,”11 does not acknowledge his other

implicit assumption that the 'soul' is related to a separate,

'supernatural' divine realm, but this is clearly an important

difference.

In sum, Tylor's idea of animism is very anachronistic, though of

course it was extremely useful at the time. He was trying to isolate

the origin or beginning of religion, while operating on the

assumption that the development of religion is a process involving a

clear “progress” toward “higher” forms. With this assumption in mind,

he could not help but distort his object of study. With the modern

separation between 'nature' and a transcendent 'divine' already

implicitly accepted in his mind, mirroring the separation between

9 Ibid. 85.10 Ibid. 11.11 Ibid. 85.

6

science and religion, Tylor could not help but extend this same

distinction to 'materialism' versus 'animism'. He could be seen to

recognize the fundamental dichotomy clearly enough when he said, “the

deepest of all religious schisms [is] that which divides Animism from

Materialism.”12 However, he failed to recognize that this was not

necessarily an inherent feature of his object of study. It was a

problem that he unconsciously constructed via the logic of his times.

As Egil Asprem says in his study of disenchantment, the historian

“does not merely describe 'the facts'... he selects, builds, and

orders history in terms of specific 'problems' that are constructed

by the scholar.”13 As other scholars have not failed to note, “Tylor

was not as rigid a positivist as he is often made out to be […]

However, he developed this representation [of animism] within a

positivistic spiritual/materialist dichotomy of 19th-century design

in direct opposition to materialist science, in the belief (and as

part of an effort to prove this belief) that only science yielded

'true' knowledge of the world.”14

There is one more interesting tidbit about the origin of Tylor's

theory of animism that deserves attention before moving on to the

'new animism'. Considering the emphasis he placed on animism being a

'spiritualist' religion, why is it that he did not simply use that

term instead of “animism”? “The word Spiritualism,” he apparently

felt obliged to explain, “has this obvious defect to us, that it has

12 Ibid. 86.13 Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939.

Ph.D. dissertation University of Amsterdam 2013, 3.14 Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited,” S68.

7

become the designation of a particular modern sect.”15 The

'spiritualist' movement happening in America and Europe at the time

certainly attracted a lot of attention, including from such respected

paragons of science as Edward Tylor. In fact, as George W. Stocking

Jr. puts it, “Tylor's concern with the modern spiritualist sect was

so strong that he left his accustomed armchair in Somerset to come up

to London for a month to engage in a kind of anthropological

fieldwork.”16 He went to witness a spiritualist séance and judge for

himself the scientific validity of the performance—which he found

lacking. Following this experience, he argued that ‘‘modern

spiritualism is a survival and a revival of savage thought.’’17 It is

not far-fetched to consider that this opinion influenced his still-

developing view of 'savage thought', which he had acquired in true

armchair fashion, without any direct experience in the field. “In an

odd reversal,” then, as Bird-David puts it, “he constructed the

origin of 'savage thought' from his first-hand knowledge of what he

presumed was its remnant—modern spiritualism.”18 This is quite an

extraordinary revelation, and may help explain part of the bias

inherent in his own theory of animism: “Being 'a confirmed scientific

rationalist', Tylor suggested that this view was a delusion, in the

same way that he regarded the spiritual séances of his time as a

delusion.”19 This view reflects his stance on disenchantment; Tylor

15 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 10.16 George W. Stocking Jr., “Animism in Theory and Practice: E.B. Tylor's

Unpublished 'Notes on “Spiritualism”',” Man, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1971): 88.

17 Ibid. 90.18 Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited,” S69.19 Ibid. S69.

8

saw animism as being prior to disenchantment and fundamentally in

opposition to it, but he seems to have implicitly accepted the

Weberian disenchantment thesis as an inevitable process, or 'the fate

of our times'. Animism, then, can only be—in his terminology—a

'survival' of primitive and misguided thought processes, with no real

potential to counteract or respond to the problem of disenchantment.

This is unfortunate, given the lasting influence Tylor's

formulation has had on the popular and academic idea of 'animism'

since. As Bird-David puts it, “Ethnographers continue to cast fresh

ethnographic material far richer than Tylor had (or could have

imagined possible) into one or more of the Tylorian categories

'religion', 'spirits', and 'supernatural beings'. At the same time,

they have commonly avoided the issue of animism and even the term

itself rather than revisit this prevalent notion in light of their

new and rich ethnographies.” When the term is used at all, its

meaning tends to remain untouched. Bird-David goes on: “A twofold

vicious cycle has ensued. The more the term is used in its old

Tylorian sense, without benefit of critical revision, the more

Tylor’s historically situated perspective is taken as 'real’, as the

phenomenon which it only glosses.”20 One could almost call Tylor's

animism a 'survival' in its own right—the persistent residue of an

antiquated anthropology, kept alive by habit.

Abram's new 'animism'

The perceived problem with the term 'animism' is evident in the

20 Ibid. S68.

9

example of the 'new animism' scholar referenced in this essay; David

Abram carefully avoids using the term, even on those pages cited

under “animism” in the index of his book, The Spell of the Sensuous:

Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Abram is an American

philosopher and cultural ecologist best known for his work connecting

phenomenology to ecology. His book The Spell of the Sensuous was inspired

by his work as an anthropologist and sleight-of-hand magician in

rural Asia. He has a definite ecological or environmentalist agenda

in writing his books,21 and is explicit in his normative stance that

modern industrial society is destructive to the global ecosystem, but

his argument is nonetheless much more subtle and refined than most,

and certainly original. The bulk of his book is a phenomenological

study of the effects of alphabetic writing on human perception,

especially the capacity for abstraction. This, he argues, is one

major element of the dwindling or disappearance of animistic

perception in the modern human consciousness. His aim is to try to

restore some of this innate human capacity to perceive the world as

animated, as part of the larger normative goal to achieve some

harmony between human society and the larger ecosystem in which it is

embedded. In doing this, he says, he is committing to “a kind of

radical immanence—even to materialism (or what I might call 'matter-

realism') in a dramatically reconceived sense of the term.”22 In

essence, he is aiming to break down the fundamental Tylorian

21 Note that I will also be quoting interchangeably from Abram's more recent book, Becoming Animal, which expands upon his theory in The Spell of the Sensuous.

22 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), Kindle Edition, 12.

10

dichotomy of spiritualism/materialism.

Tylor's original 'animism' is not wholly in opposition to the

'new animism' of Abram. As Tylor said, animism arises out of sense

evidence—“They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to

the plain evidence of man's senses.”23 Abram is in agreement with him

here, and a large portion of his argument rests on the importance of

immediate sensorial reality. For this he turns to phenomenology.

Phenomenology, he says “is the Western philosophical tradition that

has most forcefully called into question the modern assumption of a

single, wholly determinable, objective reality.”24 As it was intended

by Edmund Husserl, the school's founder, “phenomenology would

articulate the ground of the other sciences. It was Husserl's hope

that phenomenology, as a rigorous 'science of experience', would

establish the other sciences at last upon a firm footing—not,

perhaps, as solid as the fixed and finished 'object' upon which those

sciences pretend to stand, but the only basis possible for a knowledge

that necessarily emerges from our lived experience of the things

around us.”25 Abram's argument not only looks at the philosophers of

phenomenology, but also at Plato, Einstein, Descartes, Galileo,

Copernicus, and ethnographic material from dozens of indigenous

cultures. It cannot be hoped that this essay could cover such a broad

range of inspiration, so it will focus on only a few of the larger

ideas associated with 'animism'.

23 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 12.24 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New

York: Vintage Books, 1997), 31.25 Ibid. 35.

11

A profound dualism is intrinsic to any discussion of animism or

its implications. These dualisms or dichotomies—spirit vs. matter,

natural vs. supernatural, subject vs. object, mind vs. body—are

subtly present in Tylor's animism, but explicitly rejected in Abram's

new animism. Abram's point is worth quoting in full:

One such concept […] is that which opposes the inertness of sheer matter to the vibrance of pure spirit, and holds that sensible matter is vacant and lifeless without the influx of spirit—without this bright fire that descends from a divine realm beyond the physical cosmos to inspire and enliven the drabstuff of the world. This old notion, deeply layered into our Western language, neatly orders the things of the experienced world into a graded hierarchy—'the great chain of being'—whereinthose phenomena composed entirely of matter are farthest from the divine, while those that possess greater degrees of spirit are closer to the absolute freedom of God.26

Due to this idea, he says, there has been a persistent confusion

between Western notions of 'spirit', and the mysterious presences to

which indigenous cultures are seen to pay so much respect.27 This

would explain Tylor's insistence that the 'primitive' animist

believes in an immaterial human soul persisting after death, which

ties into an explanation of ancestor worship. Abram addresses this:

“[S]ome may argue that the ritual reverence paid to one's long-dead

human ancestors (and the assumption of their influence in present

life), easily invalidates my assertion that the various 'powers' or

'spirits' that move through the discourse of indigenous, oral people

are ultimately tied to nonhuman (but nonetheless sentient) forces in

the enveloping landscape,” he explains; “This objection rests upon 26 Abram, Becoming, 46.27 See Abram, Spell, 13.

12

certain assumptions implicit in Christian civilization, such as the

assumption that the 'spirits' of dead persons necessarily retain

their human form, and that they reside in a domain outside of the

physical world to which our senses given us access. However, most

indigenous tribal peoples have no such ready recourse to an

immaterial realm outside earthly nature.” Our “strictly human heavens

and hells,” he says, have only recently been abstracted from nature:

“For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth

remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead.”28 Death,

then, does not mean that the person's presence vanishes from the

world (where would it go?), but rather remains as an animating force

in the landscape.29

What seems odd to the modern human mind about this explanation,

indeed, is the idea that the human being somehow undergoes a

metamorphosis from human to some 'other' thing, either animal, plant,

even wind or rain—potentially anything. We can allow that an animal

might possess some form of consciousness, but a tree? A rock? “It's a

presumption that lingers as our deepest inheritance from the

Cartesian tradition,” Abram tells us: “the assumption that awareness,

or mind, is a special possession of our species, a property that

isolates humankind from the rest of material nature. […] The primary

dichotomy in Descartes' philosophy, after all, was not the division

between mind and body, but rather the divide between the mind and the

whole of the material world.”30 To demonstrate how a tree or a rock might be

28 Ibid. 15.29 Ibid. 16.30 Abram, Becoming, 108.

13

approached as an animate entity, he again turns to phenomenology.

“Our most immediate experience of things,” Abram tells us, “[…]

is necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter—of tension,

communication, and commingling. From within the depths of this

encounter, we know the thing or phenomenon only as our interlocutor—

as a dynamic presence that confronts us and draws us into relation.”31

Bird-Davis agrees: “We do not first personify other entities and then

socialize with them but personify them as, when, and because we

socialize with them. Recognizing a 'conversation' with a counter-

being—which amounts to accepting it into fellowship rather than

recognizing a common essence—makes that being a self in relation with

ourselves.”32 This sort of animism, it is argued, is intrinsic to

humans' pre-verbal experience of the world; “We know the things of

our world not, in truth, as determinate objects, but as acquaintances

and strangers, as trusted familiars and as troublesome neighbors, as

allies and misfits and moody, dangerous comrades.”33 This can be

easily observed wherever humans encounter a particular object that

holds meaning for them—their car, or their computer, for instance,

often is encountered and treated as if it had a personality all its

own.

It may be argued that this tendency could indeed be only a

'survival' of a childish and misguided outlook, but when the

fundamental dualities are clarified down to their essence, there is

no escaping the problem: the subject/object dichotomy simply does not

31 Abram, Spell, 56.32 Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited,” S78.33 Abram, Becoming, 72.

14

hold, even in its own most glorified domain of science and the

scientific method. No one disputes the accomplishments of the

scientific method, least of all Abram34, but he points out that the

scientist's “God's-eye view” of the world can only be feigned—true

objectivity, he claims, can only be feigned, because there are no

true 'objects' existing independently of the observer. Scientists, in

“assuming a detached and disaffected perspective,” must pretend, “for

the duration of their investigation, that they [are] not themselves

entangled in the very nature that they were studying.” During the

course of each experiment, he says, the scientist necessarily accepts

this “useful fiction,” but it is a fiction nonetheless.35 “Simply to

exist, or continue existing, is already active—already a doing—and

hence no phenomenon is utterly passive, without efficacy or

influence.”36 In other words, there is no pure 'perceiver'; only

actor-perceivers—the scientist no less so. After all, a truly

disembodied mind is useless (how can it be said to 'act' in any

meaningful way?), and in fact could not even be said to exist without

another mind to perceive it. Traditionally, the idea of God has been

summoned to fill the role of this supreme 'other'—the one with the

power to reify the isolated, disembodied human mind. But the

scientist generally doesn't have recourse to this supreme 'other',

and must instead pretend that very position!

Again, this is not necessarily problematic, so long as the

34 Ibid. 73: “Nothing I write in these pages is meant to disparage the elegant disclosures revealed by our sciences, or even the detached states of mind necessary to derive those insights.”

35 Ibid. 74.36 Ibid. 70.

15

stance is taken as a 'useful fiction', but, as Abram points out,

“There is rarely any clear translation back from the pose of a pure,

bodiless rationality to a language appropriate to our lived

engagement and rapport with the life around us.”37 The language of

science has the effect of blurring and diminishing the ordinary,

every day experience of the world. “Our direct experience is

necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or

place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and

concerns. […] Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now surround

us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to

calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a

living field, and open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods

and metamorphoses.”38 “Even the most detached scientist,” he points

out, “must begin and end her study in this indeterminate field of

experience, where shifts of climate or mood may alter his experiment

or her interpretation of 'the data': the scientist, too, must take

time off from his measurements and analyses to eat, to defecate, to

converse with friends, to interact straightforwardly with a familiar

world that is never explicitly thematized and defined.”39 This point

is deceptively obvious, but the consequences are not always so; it is

useful here to remember Tylor's own inverted logic, whereby he

derived his armchair theory of 'primitive' animism following his

personal, lived experience of witnessing a modern spiritualist

séance. As Abram says, “Our spontaneous experience of the world,

37 Ibid. 74.38 Abram, Spell, 32.39 Ibid. 33.

16

charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains

the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.”40

Here is the importance of language, and the consequences of

using scientific language unconsciously—that is, forgetting its

fictitious nature as pure observer:

We conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenomenon only by mentally absenting ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to activelyengage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surroundingworld as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies.41

In other words, we smother the animistic impulse intrinsic to human

(and all) nature. Abram sees this, rightly I think, as leading to an

experience of disenchantment. “By renouncing our animal embodiment—by

pretending to be disembodied minds looking at nature without being

situated within it—we dispel the tricksterlike magic of the world.”42

Again, Abram's language is too evocative not to quote him in full:

When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself—the only allowable refuge, in this world, for

40 Ibid. 33.41 Ibid. 56.42 Abram, Becoming, 93.

17

what is ineffable and unfathomable.43

The ineffable and unfathomable, the strange and the unknown... these

mysterious dimensions are the essence of an 'enchanted' world-view.

“[W]e should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as

'supernatural',” Abram tells us, “nor to view them as realms entirely

'internal' to the personal psyche of the practitioner. For it is

likely that the 'inner world' of our Western psychological

experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief,

originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate

earth.”44 This is a particularly interesting claim. Modern

psychological theory is sometimes summoned to provide explanations

for pre-modern human behavior, without considering the possibility

that the human psyche itself may have undergone significant

transformation since that time, making this a hopelessly

anachronistic endeavor. The idea of 'projection' is one such theory,

easy to carelessly apply to the experience of animism. “The notion of

'projection',” Abram says, “fails to account for what it is about

certain objects that calls forth our imagination. It implies that the

objects we perceive are purely passive phenomena, utterly neutral and

inert, and so enables us to overlook the way in which such objects

actively affect the space around them—the manner in which material

things are also bodies, influencing the other bodies within their

ambit, and being influenced in turn.”45 Bird-David puts it most

forcefully: “Classical theoreticians […] attributed their own 43 Abram, Spell, 10.44 Ibid. 10.45 Abram, Becoming, 32.

18

modernist ideas of self to 'primitive peoples' while asserting that

the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of self into others!”46

Animism and 'magic'

It is difficult, certainly, if not impossible, to understand

what the indigenous, pre-verbal experience of animism was really

like. As Bird-David points out, “Neither 'spirits' (deriving from the

spirit/body dualism of the modernist person-concept) nor

'supernatural beings' (mirroring the Western idea of nature) is an

appropriate English equivalent”47 for animist conceptions of the

personhood of 'objects'.” She opts instead to use the term

“superpersons” (persons with extra powers), which has interesting

implications tying in with Abram's definition of 'magic': “Magic […]

in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing

in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that

every form one perceives […] is an experiencing form, an entity with

its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very

different from our own.”48

Here Abram seems to have quite unwittingly opened up a can of

worms, because this definition of 'magic' is far from unproblematic.

In Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, Wouter

Hanegraaff sums up the multitudinous definitions of 'magic' as

variations on three basic categories. The first, “intellectualist”

category is typified by Tylor, who saw magic as based in “the

46 Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited,” S68.47 Ibid. S71.48 Abram, Spell, 9.

19

erroneous assumption of 'primitive man' that things associated in his

thinking must be connected in actual fact.”49 This formulation clearly

sets up 'magic' in opposition to 'science', with science appearing as

the clear winner. The second, “functionalist” category is linked to

the names of Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim; Mauss used the term for

“any rite that is not part of an organized cult: a rite that is

private, secret, mysterious, and ultimately tending towards one that

is forbidden.”50 This formulation relies instead on an opposition

between 'magic' and 'religion', with religion this time appearing to

hold a kind of moral high ground. The third category, originating in

the theories of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, approaches 'magic' as a kind of

'participatory' causality as contrasted against the 'instrumental'

causality of science; in a worldview of 'participation', “causes and

effects are seen as associated, or merging, to the point of identity

or consubstantiality, without assuming the presence of mediating

links.”51 Abram's use of 'magic' seems to definitely fall into this

last category, and his approach appears typical of those “later

scholars,” says Hanegraaff, who “came to assume that participation

and magic were meant to be equivalent terms.”52 Certainly Abram's

'animism' includes 'participation' as at least a very fundamental

aspect of its worldview—a worldview which is, again, contrasted

mainly in opposition to that of science and its 'instrumental'

49 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164-165.

50 Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie” (1902-1903), in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (1950), 6th edn, Quadrige / Presses Universitaires de France: Paris 1995, 3-141; as quoted in Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 165.

51 Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 165.52 Ibid. 165.

20

causality.

The problem, of course, is that Abram is unconsciously upholding

the “magic—religion—science” triad as universal concepts set in

eternal opposition to one another.53 'Magic' usually comes out the

worst in this arrangement, although in Abram's case, he is obviously

invoking the term in more of a celebratory sense. As Hanegraaff

points out, this fictitious triad can also be invoked in an attempt

“to re-enchant the world by claiming that nature [is] inherently

'magical' (now in the sense of being permeated by mysterious

forces).”54 Abram seems oblivious to the historical context of how

'magic' has more typically been used in academic and popular

discourse, and does not address the negative connotations this

history evokes. This might be because of his own matter-of-fact

acquaintance with what he calls 'magic'—his prior vocation as a

sleight-of-hand magician. Historical 'theories' of magic probably did

not factor into the straightforward work of learning how to

manipulate perception in direct engagement with an audience or

patient. But this work is what lead him to question the primacy of

instrumental causality, and to begin studying participation as an

alternative way of apprehending the world.55 Therefore perhaps it is 53 This oppositional triad can be traced to James G. Frazer. See Hanegraaff,

Esotericism, 165: “James G. Frazer […] simplified Tylor's approach into his famousevolutionist triad: humanity had evolved from magic, through religion, to science.”

54 Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 177.55 See Abram, Spell, 5: “The success of this work suggested to me that sleight-of-

hand might lend itself well to the curative arts, and I became, for the first time, interested in the relation […] between folk medicine and magic. […] But the focus of my research gradually shifted from questions regarding the application of magical techniques in medicine and ritual curing toward a deeper pondering of the relation between traditional magic and the animate natural

21

not surprising that he would equate 'magic' with 'participation', and

hence 'animism'. Still, it is a problematic and muddy conflation, as

evidenced by the fact that his definition of 'magic' can be easily be

swapped with a definition of 'animism' itself as he presents it;

“[Animism] […] in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the

experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences,

the intuition that every form one perceives […] is an experiencing

form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit

sensations that are very different from our own.”56 If anything,

'animism' seems to fit much better in this formulation than does

'magic'! Perhaps, then, any scholar wishing to further research along

the lines offered by Abram ought to abandon his reliance on this

particular terminology altogether.

Nevertheless, if we humor Abram's rather careless application of

'magic' and bracket its accompanying historical baggage to the best

of our ability, his formulation of the indigenous 'magician' is an

interesting one. He refers to magic as a kind of 'shapeshifting'—a

willed alteration of consciousness into “modes of intelligence or

awareness that do not possess a human form.”57 The magician is

therefore a kind of shapeshifter—one who not only spontaneously

perceives the participatory nature of the world, but who has learned

how to participate as more than just a human being. The magician's

power derives from his/her ability to shift into (what are believed

world. This broader concern seemed to hold the keys to the earlier questions.”56 Abram, Spell, 9; here I have replaced “magic” with “animism” to illustrate my

point.57 Ibid. 11.

22

or felt to be) nonhuman modes of consciousness or perception. The

natural and spontaneous nature of participation as a “tendency of the

human mind”58 makes this possible, without recourse to complex

philosophy or doctrines of correspondences. The animate landscape is

simply full to bursting with this alien intelligence, and the

indigenous magician is one who knows how to access it. One could

hardly imagine a more 'enchanted' experience of the world.

Animism and disenchantment

Putting aside whatever we may imagine this ancient animism to

look like, there remains the question of disenchantment itself—a very

modern concept. Is disenchantment even a real phenomenon? There is

actually some controversy here. Many authors have noted that

'disenchantment' has only really occurred in theory; it only exists

in ideal form in Weber's own thesis. As Asprem puts it, “... The

disenchantment thesis grasps something important about modern Western

intellectual history, but […] it has been poorly theorised and much

overstated.” Conceptualizing disenchantment as an inevitable process

(or “the fate of our times” as Weber himself put it) predisposes us

to a blind spot, “covering a vast and significant set of tendencies

that do not fit the narrative that the process implies.”59 One of the

critical commentators responding to Bird-Davis makes a similar point

relating more explicitly to animism: “The epistemological predicament

codified by Descartes was not so much an innovative, 'cognitive

58 See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “How magic survived the disenchantment of the world,” Religion, 33 (2003): 374.

59 Asprem, Problem, 2.

23

shift' from animism to objectivism as the emergence—or unprecedented

generalization—of a social condition of alienation. Rather than a

cerebral innovation that has since diffused, it is a reflection of a

set of social circumstances that is continually being reproduced and

expanded.”60 Disenchantment, then, is far from absolute. This is

apparent in the animistic impulse still observable in modern human

behavior; “[R]elational epistemologies [such as animism] function in

diverse contexts where other epistemologies enjoy authority,

including Western contexts (to a much greater extent than the

authoritative status of science permits).”61 The issue is one of

authority, not absolute hegemony. Reality, in other words, is much

more complex than Weber's original thesis allows, and there have been

a plurality of responses to the problem of disenchantment.

Nonetheless, Weber's thesis has a certain compelling logic which

has caused it to be widely accepted—doesn't this, in itself, help

create the problem of disenchantment? As Hanegraaff puts it,

“Disenchantment is, firstly, based upon the internalization (by means

of socialization) of this particular ideology of 'instrumental

causality', including its claims of exclusiveness and sufficiency.

The result is an acute tension with participation.”62 In other words,

there is a perceived divide between the logic which rules science and

the 'objective' world, and the logic that rules individual life and

experience. This alone generates a form of disenchantment by causing

60 Alf Hornborg, response to “'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. S1, Special Issue Culture—A Second Chance? (1999): S81.

61 Bird-David, “'Animism' Revisited,” S78.62 Hanegraaff, “How magic survived,” 376.

24

a certain estrangement, a schism between self and world, an

uncomfortable knowledge that one's own experience does not accord

with 'reality' as it is supposedly agreed to exist. As Hanegraaff

goes on, “in a culture which is based upon the social internalisation

of instrumental causality as its foundational narrative,

participation becomes something highly problematic: it looks like a

disturbing anomaly which cannot be accommodated and, in fact, 'should

not exist'. This dissonance between a spontaneous tendency of the

human mind and a specific cultural ideology is the foundation of

disenchantment.”63

Does the 'new animism' described here effectively address this

disenchantment? It is certainly an explicit attempt to do so. Asprem

warns us against the many varieties of 're-enchantment paradigm'

advocates, some fitting comfortably within the 'New Age' designation,

whom he criticizes as being alarmist and highly politicised; “...

These scholar-activists,” he says, “would paint a dystopian view of

the present that was furthermore used as a springboard for

revisionist historiography.”64 Abram might accurately be described as

a “scholar-activist,” but his thorough and methodical study, replete

with a vast array of academically-respected sources carefully

referenced and cited, does not accord with Asprem's disparaging

designation. Moreover, Abram himself has a compelling insight into

the conflict between scientific materialism and New Age spiritualism,

which effectively sets him apart from both.

[C]onventional scientific discourse privileges the sensible 63 Ibid. 377.64 Asprem, Problem, 41.

25

field in abstraction from sensory experience, and commonly maintains that subjective experience is 'caused' by an objectifiable set of process in the mechanically determined field of the sensible. Meanwhile, New Age spiritualism regularlyprivileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter, and often maintains that material reality is itself an illusory effect caused by an immaterial mind or spirit. Although commonly seen as opposed world-views, both of these positions assume a qualitative difference between the sentient and the sensed; by prioritizing one or the other, both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human 'subjects' and natural 'objects', and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension […]65

This is a fairly damning assessment of New Age spiritualism in light

of the new animism. Abram goes on to get to the heart of what, for

him, 'animism' really means:

While both of these views are unstable, each bolsters the other;by bouncing from one to the other—from scientific determinism tospiritual idealism and back again—contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive.66

Now, this brings up another question, that of the pure

materialism/pantheism paradox, because this kind of monism sounds a

lot like pantheism. If the subject/object and spirit/matter dualities

are completely collapsed, where does that leave us logically? It is a

difficult conundrum. If this animism really reduces everything to a

65 Abram, Spell, 67.66 Ibid. 67.

26

meaningless sameness, how is it that the effect itself is still

experienced as meaningful? It may be helpful to return to the

definition cited at the beginning of this essay, of animism as a

“mode of religious consciousness.” The difference between enchantment

and disenchantment, after all, is primarily a matter of consciousness

—whether the world is perceived and experienced as enchanted. Is this

question of 'enchantment' then primarily mental/cognitive, or

sensorial/phenomenological? Could this new animism be perhaps a re-

enchantment technique as much as a theoretical 'paradigm'? Animism, as

it is used here, is more an experiential sense of being in relation

with another particular being; there must be some kind of event, a

mutual engagement happening in the here and now. Pantheism, on the

other hand, is much more diffuse and unspecified, an abstract

concept. Still, the issue is confused, and remains to be puzzled out

further.

As to the possibility of a re-enchantment technique, Abram

argues for an “animistic style of speaking”67 in order to re-open the

possibility of interaction and mutual exchange with what has long

been regarded as a passive and inert nature. “... Such a way of

speaking situates the human intellect back within the sensuous cosmos.

It subverts the long isolation of the thinking self from the

perceptual world that it ponders, suggesting that we and the

sensorial surroundings are woven of the same fabric, indeed that we

are palpably entwined with all that we see, and hear, and touch—

entirely a part of the living biosphere.”68 Abram's own writing is an 67 Abram, Becoming, 70.68 Ibid. 71.

27

attempted example of this way of speaking, which is certainly

evocative and sometimes powerful, but is it enough? Or does such a

deliberate emphasis on changing the way we speak only highlight the

intractability of the original problem?

Conclusion

In conclusion, we might ask one more fundamental question

concerning disenchantment. Why does disenchantment occur at all? The

“disappearance of mysterious, incalculable forces” from the world is

sometimes spoken of as if it were an accidental byproduct of the

modern condition, or a mistake that ought to be undone. However, the

flip-side of this 'disappearance' or loss is a significant gain—the

discovery of many of the rules governing how the world works, and the

sense of power and safety that comes with that knowledge.

Disenchantment is no accident. An unknown and unknowable world is a

fearful one, and it may be that the particular 'disenchantment'

theorized in connection with modernity is only one manifestation of a

more basic human tension, between the desire for wonder and the fear

of the unknown. In any case, the modern human subject cannot be

undone, nor the particular modern conditions amenable to

disenchantment. “It is the long immersion in the concrete and

experiential specifics of place,” one commentator points out, “that

yields conditions conducive to 'relatedness'. [...] Abstraction,

detachment, and objectification are products of modern, disembedding

middle- and upper-class biographies.”69 The ancient animism of

69 Hornborg, response to “'Animism' Revisted,” S81.

28

indigenous cultures can never be reclaimed; any new animism is

necessarily going to be different, its effects uncertain—but this is

not to say that it is not worth exploring. As Abram puts it so

characteristically: “Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go

can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that unfolds us.

This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the

primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth

remains our primary cosmos.”70

70 Abram, Becoming, 7.

29

Bibliography

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Kindle edition.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Asprem, Egil. The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939. Ph.D. dissertation University of Amsterdam 2013, 1-80.

Bird-David, Nurit. “'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, andRelational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology, 40 (S1 - Special Issue Culture—A Second Chance?) (1999): S67-S91.

Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing Africa Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture, 15(2) (2003): 261-285.

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western

30

Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. “How magic survived the disenchantment of the world.” Religion, 33 (2003): 357-380.

Stocking, George W. Jr. “Animism in Theory and Practice: E.B. Tylor'sUnpublished 'Notes on “Spiritualism”'.” Man, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1971): 88-104.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (first ed. 1871). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958, vol. II, 1-14, 80-86, 441-447.