Pre-Historical Animism: Applied to the Systemised Self – Part 19, Masters Series.

Abstract

Animism is often presented as the primordial belief that every animal, plant, stone, river, and storm contains a spirit. That picture joins a real modern history of anthropological theory to a stronger claim about human prehistory than surviving evidence can establish. E. B. Tylor’s nineteenth century account cast animism as religion’s universal starting point; later scholarship has instead explored situated relationships in which other than human beings may be encountered as persons. Neither view licenses a single, unchanged spirituality shared by all ancient peoples. This essay distinguishes archaeological inference from historical ethnography and living Indigenous traditions, and compares animism carefully with Tengri traditions, Daoist texts, Vedic sources, and Shinto. Mara, a fictional municipal arborist (for the purposes of analogy in this essay), uses a street tree platform that detects hazards and schedules remediation, but whose risk score can eclipse relations not represented in its data. Animist scholarship raises a question for the Systemised Self: what changes when a model turns an encountered being into a manageable object, and when the worker comes to know herself through its categories? Digital tools can support attention and reciprocal obligations; they can also narrow responsibility when their classifications become unanswerable. This is a philosophical comparison, not proof that trees or artificial intelligence possess humanlike consciousness, nor evidence that a universal prehistoric animism existed.

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