Anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries hypothesized that animism was the earliest religion. But later scholars have called this theory into question. What is animism? And how should ...

This is really at the heart of my problem with the piece: “Animism is highly syncretic, adopting any and all spiritual beliefs and practices as complementary rather than competing options.” ...

Broadly defined, animism is the belief that everything has a spirit: trees, birds, rainstorms, rocks. Asma points out that in the Western world, amidst the ongoing, headline-grabbing scuffle ...

Most of these people are using animism in a very general, and inaccurate, way, to mean the belief that everything in nature has a soul. The renewed interest in animism stems from the hope that ...

Although Christianity has become the country’s dominant religion, animistic beliefs run deep in Filipino consciousness. People tend to feel resigned to their current states of affairs and pray ...

Animism is also rife through the Indonesian Archipelago, where different groups worship non-human entities such as inanimate objects in the belief that these things possess some spiritual essence or ...