Sea - Sea's Animism

The Banggai tribe is divided into 2: the Sea-Sea tribe who live in the mountains & the Banggai tribe who live on the coast. This animist theory has recently received extensive criticism from the latest scholarship on religious studies & anthropology because of its essentialist nature and the bias of the modern paradigm. The originator of ​​animism was Edward B Tylor, who is often referred to as the father of cultural anthropology & continued by James G Frazer.

The book Primitive Culture was written 12 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Darwin's work helped shape the spirit of the era of scholarship in the second half of the 19th century which tended to want to explain the origin of everything in an evolutionist paradigm. Animism for him is a primitive form & is the foundation of all religions.

Just like Tylor, primitive animist societies initially grappled with questions of life & death. Among the examples of myths cited by Frazer are the beliefs of the Zulu people in South Africa. Frazer also reviews the concept of magic in primitive animist societies.

Frazer reviews many examples of myths and magical practices in this primitive animist society, such as offerings to mountains so they don't erupt, rivers so they don't flood, prohibitions on cutting down certain forest areas so that the Earth God doesn't get angry and cause earthquakes, etc. Tylor-Frazer's animist narrative, which has long influenced anthropological studies, is now being criticized. In addition to the lack of adequate observation of the various variations of local indigenous people's beliefs, the latest criticism of this animist theory is its essentialist nature which seeks to equate all indigenous people's beliefs and practices in a grand narrative about the origin of religion.

Hallowell's ideas are based on his anthropological studies of the Ojibwe indigenous community in Canada and he puts forward a thesis on personhood as the worldview of indigenous peoples.