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Animism

By Benjamin D. Schluter

Introductory Overview

Animism is the attribution of spirit, life, agency, sentience, subjectivity, or personhood to other-than-human beings, such as animals, plants, objects, elements, places, or natural phenomena. Coined by Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871, animism originally designated a ‘primitive’ system of religious belief opposed to scientific rationalism; anthropological studies accordingly reinforced disparaging attitudes toward the beliefs and practices of colonized peoples. In the later twentieth century, however, ‘new animist’ scholars challenged Tylor’s ethnocentric presuppositions, recentering the concept of animism around Indigenous models of relational personhood. Today, animism is more positively associated with ethics of care for the planet and its other-than-human inhabitants.

This entry outlines the history of ‘old’ and ‘new’ animism vis-à-vis its influences from and receptions within Germanic thought and culture—from the early modern period to Romanticism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary film. The final section, in particular, examines the German Romantics’ fascination with elemental spirits as an expression of animism avant la lettre, whose aesthetic and philosophical legacy lives on today.

‘Old’ Animism: Tylor through Freud

E.B. Tylor’s (1871) Primitive Culture first defined animism—a term borrowed from the early modern German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl—as “the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general” (1:21). For Tylor, animism represented the original system of religious belief; as an unflinching materialist, however, he equally considered it a “primitive, childlike conception” (1:431) of reality which cultures overcame as they progressed from “savagery towards civilization” (1:19). While Tylor also discussed survivals of animistic belief in modern Western society, such as the Christian idea of the soul or the then-popular Spiritualist movement, his primary ethnographic evidence documented Indigenous cultures of colonized Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. What Tylor viewed as their “idea of pervading life and will in nature far outside modern limits” (1:260), extending to a “belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies” (1:260), represented for him a mythical and erroneous logic of “personification” (1:258, 1:260) that contradicted scientific investigation of nonhuman beings and phenomena. 

By the mid-twentieth century, Tylor’s anthropology and concept of animism fell out of favor for several reasons: first, a rejection of its ethnocentric teleology of cultural evolution; second, competing anthropological, sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories about the origin of religion; and third, growing skepticism toward dualistic ontologies, such as the spirit/matter dichotomy. Nonetheless, Tylor’s ‘old’ idea of animism became fundamental to anthropological debates around the turn of the 20th century (see Harvey 2006, 5–13).

In the German context, Sigmund Freud drew on Tylor’s definition of animism in order to bridge psychoanalytic theory with cultural-historical analysis. "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts," the third essay of Totem and Taboo from 1913, argues that animistic beliefs mirror the narcissistic phase of libidinal development when children overestimate the power of their wishes to shape reality (Freud 1990, 110–12). Freud’s thesis on animism remained consistent throughout his life, notably reappearing in his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” which traces certain eerie effects to “remnants of animistic mental activity” (Freud 2003, 147). Reappropriating Tylor’s theory of cultural evolution, Freud argues that uncanny phenomena like the “apparently animate doll” (140) and “evil eye” (146) disturb us because “primitive [animistic] beliefs that have been surmounted appear to be once again confirmed” (155). Despite the enormous productivity of Freud’s uncanny for aesthetic studies, its conceptual proximity to the ethnocentric biases of Tylor’s ‘old’ animism leaves it open to similar critiques.

‘New’ Animism: Hallowell to Today

The roots of ‘new animism’ emerged in 1960 with Alrfred Irving Hallowell’s pioneering study, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View” (1960), which sought to understand Indigenous animistic cultures in North America without “projecting . . . categorical abstractions derived from Western thought” (21). Most influentially, Hallowell argued that the Ojibwe’s understanding of animacy in beings “which to us clearly belong to a physical inanimate category” (26) centers around a social and relational model of ‘personhood’ that transcends the individualistic, anthropocentric limitations of Western philosophical and legal definitions. Following Hallowell’s lead, new animist theorists such as Nurit Bird-David and Graham Harvey reframed animism as a ‘relational epistemology’ centered around conditions and practices of recognizing personhood in other-than-human beings. Personhood, in the new animist framework, is not projected onto ‘inanimate’ beings (as Tylor argued) but rather emerges from the field of reciprocal interactions uniting humans, animals, and elements. “Recognizing a ‘conversation’ with a counter-being,” Bird-David (1999) writes, “amounts to accepting it into fellowship rather than recognizing a common essence [and] makes that being a self in relation with ourselves” (S78). In Harvey’s oft-cited definition, animists are “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others” (in von Stuckrad 2023). For Harvey, as for Hallowell, animist sentiments are not “innate and instinctual” (Harvey 2006, 18), nor are they limited to a select few; rather, one learns how to recognize other-than-human personhood through instruction, practice, and experience.

Expanded frameworks for personhood carry significant ethical and environmental ramifications, as exemplified by the 2017 decision to recognize the legal personhood of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, or New Zealand. The effort was championed by the Whanganui Māori, who have long considered the river both a “living being” and “ancestor” (Tumin 2024). Similarly, Indigenous leaders across Oceania signed a treaty in 2024 which acknowledges the legal personhood of whales, in hopes of granting them greater rights and protections (Tumin 2024).

Other new animist theorists, such as David Abram and Timothy Ingold, have approached animistic relationality from a phenomenological perspective. In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram ([1997] 2017) draws on Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his own experiences among shamans in rural Asia to flesh out a participatory model of perception in which perceiver and perceived are reciprocally entangled. “Direct, prereflective perception is inherently . . . animistic,” Abram writes, “disclosing the things and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies” (130). Ingold (2006) similarly argues that animism is moreso a way of being in the world than a system of beliefs about it. For the animist, Ingold writes, life “is not an attribute of things . . . but is rather immanent in the very process of that world’s continual generation or coming-into-being” (10) and thus precedes the ontological separation of perceiver and perceived, organism and environment.

Amitav Ghosh (2016) has recently speculated that the rise of new animist studies, alongside other trends of humanistic inquiry into the more-than-human, reflects the present urgency of anthropogenic climate change, as “freakish weather events” are “animated by cumulative human actions” (32). Alluding to Freud, Ghosh writes that “one of the uncanniest effects of the Anthropocene” is a “renewed awareness of the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even perhaps the planet itself” (63). Given frequent overlaps between animist and environmentalist concerns, Ghosh’s suggestion stands to reason; however, it is important to bear in mind that animistic awareness is only “renewed” vis-á-vis Western modernity’s delegitimization of Indigenous and ‘folk’ epistemologies, which have nonetheless persevered. The ‘newness’ of new animism, in other words, reflects a contemporary turn in the academic definition of animism rather than a novel sentiment or ethos.

German Romanticism’s Elemental Animism

In her touchstone paper, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Nurit Bird-David (1999) suggests that “the most intriguing question is why and how the modernist project estranged itself from the tendency to animate things” (S79). Like many other new animist theorists, Bird-David points to Cartesian “spirit/body” (S71) dualism, which, in Ghosh’s (2016) words, “‘arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being” (24). A related and perhaps equally intriguing question is when, besides today, animist countercurrents in Western thought and culture have challenged the authority of “the modernist project” from within.

A notable example is German Romanticism’s fascination with the pre-Cartesian philosophy of Paracelsus, especially his writings on elementals or elemental spirits: animate embodiments of the four classical elements. Already in Goethe’s Faust, Part One ([1808] 2008), elementals appear in close connection to the Earth Spirit (Erdgeist), who reveals to Faust a vibrant, interconnected cosmos and teaches him to recognize “[my brothers] in the quiet woods, the air / The water” (meine Brüder / Im stillen Busch, in Luft und Wasser) (102). Faust’s ambiguous phrasing captures an animist’s sense of reciprocity and kinship with both the beings inhabiting the elements (e.g., birds, fish) as well as the elements (air, water) themselves. The Earth Spirit’s revelation of nature as “An eternal wave / Turning, returning / A life ever burning” (Ein ewiges Meer, Ein wechselnd Weben, / Ein glühend Leben) (19) likewise channels a paradigmatic turn around 1800 from the Cartesian paradigm of ‘dead’ matter toward more animate conceptions of being—such as one also discovers in the philosophies of Herder, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. 

German Romanticism’s true honeymoon with elemental spirits, however, began in 1811 with Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, a fairy tale novella about a water spirit named Undine who marries a human in order to gain a soul. While this element of the plot arguably evokes the soul/body dualism of Tylor’s ‘old’ concept of animism, it is indeed the unsouled water spirits—foremost Undine’s uncle, Kühleborn—through whom Fouqué’s text most radically expresses the life of the elements as such. Kühleborn’s protean, paradoxical transformations between humanoid and aquatic forms consistently unsettle the reader’s differentiation of ‘inanimate’ matter from animate persons (see Kramer 2016, 120; Schluter 2023, 150–51). Indeed, allusions to Kühleborn’s hidden presence are first recognized after repeated readings; Undine, in this sense, trains its reader to attend to subtle signs of elemental animacy that elude a first impression. Beyond visual cues, Kühleborn also manifests as noise: onomatopoetic rumblings of thunderstorms and sibilant sounds of splashing water that shape a literary space for the elements to speak their language (see Abram 2017, 81–82). 

Fouqué’s text has inspired countless adaptations across various media, not least E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 opera, Undine. Inspired by the sounds of a thunderstorm that reminded him of Kühleborn, Hoffmann latched onto the watery soundscapes of Fouqué’s novella and sought to bring them to life in music and on the stage (Schluter 2023, 150). His work on the Undine opera paralleled musical treatises and stories of the same period (e.g., Kreisleriana, 1814; “Die Automate,” 1814) in which he speculated on the composer's ability to understand, mediate, and transcribe the vibrant sounds of elemental nature. Moreover, Hoffmann’s Undine inaugurated a lineage of German Romantic operas about animate elements that continued through Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling (1833), Albrecht Lortzing’s Undine (1845), and Richard Wagner’s Der Rheingold (1869). 

Two centuries later, German Romanticism’s fascination with animate elements lives on: Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020), the first installment of an ‘elemental’ trilogy of films that also includes Roter Himmel (2023) and Miroirs No. 3 (2025), reimagines Fouqué’s tale in present day Berlin. In an interview, Petzold (2020a) suggests that the film confronts the anthropogenic destruction of “spaces” and “moods” in which “fairy tales . . . could have happened” (15:45–16:50). For Petzold, in other words, Undine’s afterlife in narrative and art traces a relational history between humans and Umwelt: as environments and their inhabitants are lost, so are possibilities of imagining and relating to them as persons or co-beings. In a humorous but pivotal moment of Petzold’s film, the character Christoph performs CPR on Undine while singing “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. “Can you revive me again?” (Kannst du mich nochmal wiederbeleben?) (Petzold 2020b, 29:21) Undine asks him afterwards—a playful allusion to the film’s own place within a lineage of Undine “revivals,” as well as an urgent plea for life on behalf of the elements themselves.

Reference Works 

  • Abram, David. (1997) 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage.
  • Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (S1): S67–S91. https://doi.org/10.1086/200061.
  • Freud, Sigmund. (1913) 1999. Totem and Taboo. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 
  • Freud, Sigmund. (1919) 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McClintock. New York: Penguin.
  • Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1808) 2008. Faust, Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Hallowell, Alfred Irving. (1960). “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Culture in HIstory: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond, 19–52. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Harvey, Graham. 2006. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Ingold, Timothy. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought.” Ethnos 71 (1): 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840600603111.
  • Kramer, Anke. 2016. “Elementargeister und die Grenzen des Menschlichen. Agierende Materie in Fouqués Undine.” PhiN Beiheft 10: 104–124. https://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft10/b10t08.pdf.
  • Petzold, Christian. 2020a. “Christian Petzold on His Mythological Melodrama Undine.” Interview by Dennis Lim. Film at Lincoln Center, October 9, 2020. Video, 27 min., 19 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nsE6gnKLB8.
  • Petzold, Christian, dir. 2020b. Undine. Schramm Film, Koerner & Weber; IFC Films, 2021. https://www.kanopy.com/en/video/13886037.
  • Schluter, Benjamin D. 2023. “Unexpected Bodies of Water: On the “Blue” Goethezeit.” Goethe Yearbook (30): 147–54. https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2023.0014.
  • von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2025. “The Revival of Animism in the 21st Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. May 24, 2023; Accessed June 14, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.1172. 
  • Tumin, Remy. 2024. “In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give them ‘Personhood’.” New York Times, March 29.
  • Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy Religion, Art, and Custom. 2 vols. London: John Murray.