Animism

E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) gave the term, borrowed from the physician Georg Stahl, its anthropological sense: a theory that such beliefs arose from misreading dreams. Scholars largely discarded that theory; at the end of the twentieth century animism was rebuilt, on more respectful terms, as a coherent way of relating to the world.

E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); Georg Ernst Stahl, Theoria medica vera (1708); Nurit Bird-David, 'Animism Revisited', Current Anthropology 40 (1999)