1 document
# 36
Animism in the Sciences Then and Now
Cornelius Borck
Animism began in the sciences, when the chemist and physician Georg Ernst Stahl coined the term for describing the specificity of living matter, its distinctive character vis-à-vis non living things. Its modern, almost inverted meaning, however, goes back to the Anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor who used it to characterize a worldview that does not discriminate—or at least, not properly—between living and non-living matter but believes in “universal animation of nature” (Tylor: Primitive…
e-flux Journal
Posted: July 1, 2012
Subjects
Animism, Science, Postcolonial Theory, Epistemology