Article: Rethinking animism.(Faces in the Clouds by Stewart Guthrie)(Brief Article)

Stringer concludes his article on animism (1999) by discussing, at some length, another study and my Faces in the clouds (1993). Unfortunately, he misrepresents what I say. Guthrie, he writes, thinks that animism is giving 'human personality to non-human objects' and that animism can be 'reduced only to those non-empirical entities that appear to have personality or other "human" attributes' (Stringer 1999: 551). That is, I equate animism with anthropomorphism.

Actually, I recommend clearly and repeatedly that these two terms not be equated.

Animism, I argue, is best defined as attributing characteristics of living things (e.g. sentience and spontaneous ...

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