The World Is Full of Persons: Animism Old and New

31 January 2026

Our title adapts a sentence from the philosophy that the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell learned from his Ojibwe hosts and that the religion scholar Graham Harvey placed at the center of the field: the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human. It is as good a one-line definition of animism as the literature offers, and it marks how far the concept has traveled since E. B. Tylor coined the term in Primitive Culture (1871) to name what he considered the primitive error at the root of all religion: the mistaken attribution of souls to things. For Tylor animism was a failed proto-science, destined to evaporate before the real thing. The twentieth century did not oblige him.

The new animism

The rehabilitation began in earnest with Hallowell's fieldwork in Manitoba, published as "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View" (1960). Ojibwe grammar, he reported, classes certain stones as animate, and when he asked an elder whether all the stones we see about us are alive, he received the answer that has organized the field since: "No! But some are." Personhood, in this frame, is not a biological category but a relational one: a person is what one enters into reciprocal relations with, what gives and receives, addresses and answers. Nurit Bird-David reframed animism as a "relational epistemology," a way of knowing neighbors rather than a theory of souls; Harvey's Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005) consolidated the position, and Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think pushed it into semiotics. On this account the animist is not mistaken about physics. The animist is disciplined about relationship.

Why this matters to the practitioner

Most of what this site discusses quietly presupposes some form of the animist stance. Spirit work of the grimoire sort addresses nonhuman persons by name and rank. The hedge-riding traditions journey into their territory and mind the local law. Even dowsing reads best, historically, as address rather than detection: a question put to a knowing landscape. The relational definition also supplies the ethics without additional apparatus. If persons are those with whom one exchanges, then practice consists of introductions, offerings, reciprocity, and the standing possibility of refusal, and the folk traditions' elaborate courtesies toward wells, trees, thresholds, and the dead stop looking quaint and start looking like professional conduct.

The honest tensions

Two should be named. The new animism is an academic reconstruction, and indigenous thinkers have noted the irony of the West rediscovering, with citations, what colonization spent centuries suppressing; the practitioner borrowing the vocabulary owes the sources acknowledgment and the living communities respect, per the closure rule in Working across Belief Systems. And relational personhood cuts both ways: a world full of persons is a world in which one can be rude, in debt, or unwelcome, and the traditions that live this ontology treat those states with complete seriousness. The etiquette is most of the art, and one need not resolve the metaphysics to adopt it. Some stones, as the elder said. The practice is learning which.