The claim that animism, as presented in Eugene Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, treats animals and humans as equals is contradicted by the anthropocentric interpretations of actual tribes. This article discusses how animism is a faith that is interpreted according to human interests rather than animal respect, and raises the need to think about true animal respect.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus, he compares animism to the Bible and argues that in animism, animals are considered equal to humans. This is most evident in “Children of the Serpent” at the beginning of Part 1 of his book. Yuval Noah Harari writes that evidence from anthropology and archaeology suggests that primitive hunter-gatherers likely believed in animism; they did not believe there was an intrinsic gap between humans and other animals. They believed that the world belonged to all the animals that lived there, and that everyone should follow a common set of rules.
However, in Zan Kazes’ book Civility to Animals, we see tribes with an animistic worldview interpreting and reinterpreting animals to fit their own positions. This is the exact opposite of what Yuval Noah Harari believes animism to be. So, is animism really about treating animals and humans as equals?
A more accurate definition of animism is “the belief in soulful beings,” and many tribes that practiced animism believed that all natural objects-humans, animals, plants, and other natural phenomena-had souls. As such, they worshiped nature and tried to live in harmony with everything in it. This description may conjure up images of animals and humans sharing space, sharing food, and respecting each other. However, there’s a big difference between imagination and reality, and the reason for this difference is that “living in harmony with nature” is a human-centered interpretation. This is partly due to the lack of communication between humans and nature, and partly due to the tendency of humans to interpret nature to suit their own interests.
In Homo Deus, Eugene Noah Harari gives tribes, including the Nayaka, the title of “animals and humans as equals” just for having some animistic attitudes. However, I think this is a result of the lifestyle and ritual culture of the tribes at the time and their lack of understanding of animism. Zan Kazes’s book, which considers the animal’s point of view, refutes Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis.
The Blackfoot Indian tribe of Montana, USA, was a prime example of an anthropocentric interpretation of nature that sought to live in harmony with it. Their preferred method of hunting bison was to drive them from the top of a cliff, forcing them to throw themselves off the edge. The bison that fell off the cliff would suffer great wounds and die a painful death, and the Indians would take the dead bison. What’s unusual is how they interpreted it: the Indians believed the bison died as a self-sacrifice. They believed that the bison had jumped off the cliff at the behest of the legendary bison leader, the “Bison Archetype,” who had ordered them to do so. Thus, to the Blackfoot Indians, the bison were “voluntary victims who offered their flesh for human food.” This anthropocentric interpretation may have convinced the Blackfoot Indians that they were at one with nature, like the bison.
The Ainu people of the northern islands of Japan were another animist tribe with an anthropocentric interpretation. They had a tradition of capturing black bear cubs in the mountains and bringing them back to their villages. As the bears grew and became fierce, they were kept in wooden cages for two years to fatten them up, and when the time came to eat them, it was considered good news for everyone, including the bears themselves. In a festival called “Sending the Bear,” eating the bear was to send it back to the mountains. The bears were believed to return happily, and people used these send-off ceremonies to express their respect for the bears and their discomfort with killing them.
Looking at these two tribes, do you think they would have practiced these rituals because they viewed animals and humans as equals? I don’t think so. They would certainly be outraged and saddened if they were in the shoes of the bison or bear. So why did they do these things in the name of animism? I believe it is because they are human beings. No matter how you slice it, animism, the Bible, or humanism, humanism is inevitably included because we are all human. Even if both nature and humans are soulful beings, they have interpreted the position of other souls in favor of their own species, the human species, or their own tribe, the Blackfoot Indian or the Ainu. Furthermore, nature could not communicate directly with humans, so it could not refute their biased interpretations. This shows that they never considered animals and humans equal. Although they may have thought they were treating animals and humans equally and respecting animal spirits, what actually happened to animals did not support their claims. The statement in Homo Deus that “Animism treats animals and humans as equals” was false. It may have been more moderate than the biblical era, which blatantly put animals below humans, but in the end, there is no difference between the two faiths in that they did not put animals and humans on the same level.
Homo Deus mentions the Nayakas of southern India, who have maintained an animistic worldview to this day. The Nayakas seem to share a worldview that is somewhere in between humanism and animism. They walk through the jungle and if they encounter a dangerous animal, they approach it and talk to it, leave an elephant that has killed one of their own alone, and even try to understand how it feels. But what’s truly interesting about the Nayakas is not their animistic attitude, but their attitude toward their cultivated plants and domesticated animals. They insist that cows, chickens, and tea trees are not meant to be full-grown. They claim that the cows are not overgrown because they have to pull them around, and the tea trees are not overgrown because they grow them to buy what they need from the store. Given these arguments, the Nayaka outwardly maintain a framework of animism, but in reality, they have an extremely humanistic mindset, changing their attitude depending on whether they need it or not. Although they would have excluded domesticated animals or crops that they needed to use to assuage their guilt, that very “exclusion” is what makes them noticeably different from previous tribes, such as the Blackfoot Indians. Earlier animist tribes did not separate nature. Nature was nature, even if they applied anthropocentric and discriminatory interpretations to it. For the Nayaka, however, all natural objects are not “nature” in the sense of animism. Some things that have no direct use for the Nayaka become “mansan,” or “nature,” and the rest of nature for the Nayaka, like the animals of biblical times, are relegated to the level of things far below humans.
This shows that the Nayakas do not treat animals and humans equally. If Yuval Noah Harari chose animism to demonstrate respect for animals, I would say that it was a poor choice, especially using the Nayakas as an example. If he wanted to refer to the Nayakas, he should have excluded the idea of the Mansan, which would have been more effective in making his point. However, I think that the concept of the mansan was too humanistic to explain the animism that Yuval Noah Harari envisioned, leaving room for further reflection on animism.
There is no such thing as Homo deus, where animals and humans are equal. Even if an animal is given a soul, the soul is meaningless if the interpretation of the soul is up to humans, or if humans arbitrarily decide which animal is given the soul. Therefore, from this point of view, the respectful attitude towards animals today is more important. At the very least, a respectful person or group of people sees animals as animals, and tries to understand their situation or problem by focusing on them, not humans. If Eugene Noah Harari was worried that when Homo sapiens became Homo deus, the way we treated each other would be similar to the way we treat laboratory and domestic animals, then given the steady progress that seems to be being made in respectful attitudes toward animals today, we can at least hope for a better situation, if not outright equality.
