SOMETHING OLD AND SOMETHING NEW

Belief in spiritual beings, termed animism by E. B. Tylor, appears culturally universal. Nowadays, animism in the sense of “spirits everywhere” is often associated with people in small-scale societies, such as hunter-gatherers. Jean Piaget (1929, 1954) defined animism somewhat differently: as the attribution of agency to the biologically lifeless. Piaget associated this, as many still do, with children.

However, both associations are too narrow, since animism is common in industrial societies and adults. Moreover, according to Darwin, higher mammals may be animists as well. We all are fundamentally similar, he wrote, and all may see inanimate objects as inhabited by agents, as when his dog, seeing a parasol moved by wind, barked and growled fiercely.

Animism still puzzles us. Where does it come from? How does it relate to religion? Was Darwin's dog an animist? New work on cognition is relevant. A particular view of religion is buttressed by this work and, in turn, provides a context for applying it to animism.

A COGNITIVE THEORY

The underlying argument here first appeared as “A Cognitive Theory of Religion” (Guthrie 1980). Three of that paper's propositions – detecting intentional agents is of special concern, our sensitivities to them are correspondingly well developed, and we inevitably over-detect – have been adopted in varied cognitive approaches to religion. Still, the theory struck some as leaving an important question unanswered: if, as it holds, gods, ghosts and other humanlike agents, including their traces and messages, are anthropomorphisms, why are they frequently represented as invisible and/or immaterial, when actual humans are not? And if invisible, why are they plausible?