High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Animism (from Latin anima "soul, life") is the religious worldview that natural physical entities—including animals, plants, and often even inanimate objects or phenomena—possess a spiritual essence. Specifically, animism is used in the anthropology of religion as a term for the religion of indigenous tribal peoples, especially prior to the development and/or infiltration of civilization and organized religion. Although each tribe is unique in its specific mythologies and rituals, the term animism is often used to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous tribespeoples` spiritual or "supernatural" perspectives --- in a word, their worldview, or their "reality." Some members of the civilized, non-tribal world also consider themselves animists (such as author Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan, and many Neopagans) and, of course, not all peoples who describe themselves as tribal would describe themselves as animistic. In fact the tribal animistic perspective is so fundamental, mundane, everyday and taken-for-granted that most animistic indigenous people do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"); the term is a purely anthropological construct rather than one designated by tribespeople themselves. Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinion has differed—ever since Sir Edward Tylor`s 19th-century popularization of the term—on whether animism refers to merely a broadly religious belief or to a full-fledged religion in its own right.