Discuss the concept of animism and differentiate it from naturism

Animism

Tylor, in Primitive Culture, defined religion minimally as belief in spiritual beings. Animism is the doctrine that souls and spirits inhabit humans, animals, plants and objects. He thought early humans inferred a soul from dreams, trance and death. The soul of the dead could become a ghost. Spirits could fill the world. Polytheism and later monotheism were, in his evolutionary ladder, developments from this base. Animism is therefore a theory of souls and agencies inside and behind things. Durkheim later attacked the idea that religion is only a mistaken science of spirits, and placed totemism and the sacred at the centre instead. The word animism is still used in a looser way for many indigenous cosmologies, which is not exactly Tylor’s evolutionary scheme.

Naturism and the difference

Max Muller, a scholar of the Vedas, argued that religion grew from the personification of natural phenomena: sun, dawn, storm and fire. Names of powers became gods through a disease of language, as metaphors hardened. Naturism locates the origin in awe before nature’s forces, not in the dream-soul. Vedic hymns to Agni and Ushas were his illustrations.

The difference is clear. Animism starts from the idea of a soul that can exist apart from the body and then populates the world with spirits. Naturism starts from natural objects and events that are named and then worshipped as deities. One is a psychology of the double, the other is a mythology of sky and storm. Both are origin theories that treat early humans as puzzled philosophers. Bronislaw Malinowski, Durkheim and later anthropologists argued that religion is also ritual, group solidarity and practical magic, not only a theory of souls or of weather. A good answer defines, differentiates, and then refuses to let either term exhaust the sociology of religion.