“Discuss the concept of animism and differentiate it from naturism.” (2024)
Animism and naturism were the two leading nineteenth-century answers to the question of how religion began. Edward Burnett Tylor traced it to belief in spirits, Friedrich Max Müller to the personification of nature. Both theories were intellectualist and evolutionist, but they started from different experiences: the dream and the sky.
Animism: Tylor’s concept
- In Primitive Culture (1871) Tylor offered a “minimum definition” of religion as the belief in Spiritual Beings, and named it animism (Latin anima, soul).
- Origin: early humans puzzled over what separates a living body from a corpse, and over the human figures seen in dreams. They inferred a separable soul that survives death.
- Extension: the soul idea was applied to animals, plants and objects, and later to ghosts, ancestors and gods.
- Evolution: lower animism, without moral reckoning after death, gave way to higher animism with reward and punishment, and spirit belief moved through polytheism to monotheism.
Naturism: Müller’s concept
Müller, the Oxford philologist who edited the Rig Veda, argued (Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1873) that religion begins with a perception of the infinite in overwhelming natural phenomena: sky, sun, dawn, storm and fire. Vedic names such as Dyaus (sky) and Agni (fire) show descriptive words hardening into divine persons, a process he called a “disease of language”.
Animism and naturism compared
| Criterion | Animism | Naturism |
|---|---|---|
| Object of belief | Souls and spirits within persons and things | Natural forces personified as gods |
| Source experience | Dreams, trance, death | Awe at nature’s grandeur |
| Mechanism | Faulty inference by a reasoning mind | Metaphor turning into myth through language |
| Evidence | Ethnographic reports on simple societies | Comparative philology, Vedic texts |
| Human faculty | Intellect | Feeling and language |
Critiques common to both
- Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) held that both reduce religion to a hallucination and cannot explain the absolute gap between sacred and profane: nature is too regular to inspire it, and dreams need no sacred reading. He put totemism, whose real object is society, in their place.
- R. R. Marett argued that animatism, awe of impersonal power (mana), preceded belief in souls.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion, 1965) dismissed both as unverifiable conjectural history.
Indian illustrations
- Santhal religion centres on bongas, spirits of hill, grove and household, represented by stones in the village jaherthan: close to animism. The Oraon link between the supreme deity Dharmes and the sun, and reverence for Earth as mother, lean towards naturism. Both coexist in the same festivals, such as Sarhul.
- Nurit Bird-David (“‘Animism’ Revisited”, 1999), studying the Nayaka of South India, recast animism as a relational epistemology that treats nature as a community of persons, not a mistaken belief.
- The demand for a separate Sarna religion code, backed by a Jharkhand Assembly resolution in 2020 and renewed by the Chief Minister in May 2026 for Census 2027, shows such nature-and-spirit religion becoming a political identity.
Conclusion
Animism peoples the world with spirits; naturism deifies nature itself. As theories of origin both have failed, but as descriptions of two recurring religious orientations they endure. Tribal India shows them interwoven in living practice, not arranged as successive stages.