Central to the approaches to what is often called the “new animism” is a rejection of previous scholarly attempts to identify it as either metaphoric, a projection of human society onto nature as in the tradition of Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1976), or as some sort of imaginary delusion, exposing primitive man's inability to distinguish dreams from reality as in the tradition of E. B. Tylor (1871). Instead, the scholars concerned – including Philippe Descola (1986), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998a), Tim Ingold (2000: 111–31; 2006), Morten Pedersen (2001), Graham Harvey (2005a), Aparedica Vilaça (2005) and Carlos Fausto (2007) – each in their way seek to take animism seriously by reversing the primacy of Western metaphysics over indigenous understandings and follow the lead of the animists themselves in what they are saying about spirits, souls and the like.

In my own book Soul Hunters (2007), I pushed in the same direction, arguing along phenomenological lines that animist cosmology is essentially practical, intimately bound up with indigenous peoples' ongoing engagement with the world. Accordingly, animism is nothing like a formally abstracted philosophy about the workings of the world or a symbolic representation of human society. Instead, it is mostly pragmatic and down to earth, restricted to particular relational contexts of involved activity, such as the mimetic encounter between hunter and prey.