Aux archives de l’animisme

Abstract

In 1871, Edward Tylor rejected the narratives of his time which denied the existence of religious beliefs among certain peoples then considered savages. One such narrative was that of the Victorian explorer Samuel Baker, whose authority as an ethnographer was called into question by the reports of some European travellers who had also observed the Nilotic peoples—among them the Nuer. Unlike other sources on Primitive Culture, the quality of these forgotten ethnographic works was unfortunately quite mediocre; but they did support Tylor in one of the most decisive assertions of all his works—namely the universal nature of animism. These issues cannot be separated from a cumulative ethnographic perspective which also represents one of the the great questions posed by Tylor, and a challenge to the prevailing anthropological thinking of the present moment, particularly as regards post-colonial criticism of the ethnographic contents in the archives.

Keywords

• animism
• archives
• Edward Tylor
• evolutionism
• history of ethnology
• Nilotic peoples