Animisme
At Philippe Descola’s, animism isn’t some archaic belief that endows things with a soul, but one of the four ways of identifying existents—the one that assumes similar interiorities and different physicalities between humans and non-humans. The same spirit resides in distinct bodies: the bear, the tapir, the river have a soul like mine, but a body that gives them another point of view. It’s the inverse formula of modern naturalism, which unites us through matter and divides us through spirit.
Dans l’animisme « standard », les humains disent que des non-humains se perçoivent comme des humains parce que, en dépit de leurs formes différentes, ils ont les uns et les autres des intériorités (des âmes, des subjectivités, des intentionnalités, des positions d’énonciation) semblables.
Descola reclaims a term long dismissed as pejorative—the animism of the evolutionists, a childish stage of the mind that would populate the world with spirits—and flips it. What he retains from the word is a single trait, legible in its etymology: “the attribution by humans to non-humans of an interiority identical to their own.” Not a projective delusion, but a coherent ontology, one of the four recognized by his comparative anthropology.
The framework is understood through its contrasts. Four combinations emerge from the interplay of resemblances and differences “between self and other along the axes of interiority and physicality.” Animism: similar interiorities, different physicalities. Naturalism—our own: the exact inverse, a shared universal matter binding us to beasts, while spirits set us apart. Left are totemism and analogism. None is truer than another: they are grammars of the world, considerations extended differently to the living. Where the Amazonian hunter speaks to the xapiri because he assumes it has a soul, the modern classifies the same being among nature’s objects.
Descola’s animism ≠ the animism of old textbooks: the latter denotes a cognitive error, a relic to be overcome; the former, an ontology as rigorous as our own. And animism ≠ naturalism: the first unites through interiority and divides through the body, the second unites through the body and divides through the mind.