Animistic ways of seeing the world remain vibrant across many regions, especially among indigenous and traditional communities whose lives are closely interwoven with land, animals, and ancestral memory. In large parts of Africa, for example, numerous ethnic groups, including Yoruba and various Bantu-speaking peoples, maintain religious systems in which ancestors, river and forest beings, and other nature spirits are active presences, often alongside Christianity or Islam. Among the San of the Kalahari and the Maasai of East Africa, as among many others, the natural environment is not merely a backdrop but a field of relationship with spiritual forces. Such traditions tend to understand mountains, trees, and animals as participants in a shared, living cosmos rather than as inert resources.

Across the Americas, similar sensibilities can be found among many Indigenous peoples. Inuit communities of the Arctic, various Native American and First Nations groups such as the Lakota, Cherokee, and Ojibwe, and numerous Amazonian peoples like the Shipibo, Kayapo, and Yanomami regard animals, forests, rivers, and winds as animated by spirit. In the Andean regions, Indigenous communities such as Quechua and Aymara honor the earth and mountain spirits while also engaging with Christian symbols and practices. These traditions often involve offerings, ritual dialogue with the land, and a sense that human life is embedded within a much wider community of persons, both visible and invisible.

In Asia, animistic worldviews appear in many forms, from village shrines to complex ritual systems. Shinto in Japan, for instance, centers on kami—spirits or deities associated with trees, rocks, rivers, and mountains—while related sensibilities are present among the Ainu of northern Japan. Various Siberian peoples such as the Evenk, Yakut, and Chukchi, as well as many hill and upland communities in Southeast Asia, including the Hmong and other tribal groups in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, sustain shamanic and animistic practices that engage animal, landscape, and ancestral spirits. In these contexts, the boundary between human and more-than-human persons is porous, and ritual specialists mediate relationships across that threshold.

In Australia and the Pacific, Indigenous Australians hold Dreaming traditions in which landforms, animals, and places are ancestral beings with ongoing spiritual presence, shaping both cosmology and daily conduct. Many Melanesian cultures and traditional Pacific Islander communities likewise revere spirits of land, sea, forests, and ancestors, with sacred sites and guardian beings structuring social and ecological life. In parts of Europe, echoes of older animistic sensibilities persist among the Sámi of northern Scandinavia and within certain neo-pagan and folk religious movements that treat nature as ensouled. Across all these settings, animism rarely stands apart from other religions; instead, it interweaves with Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and other faiths, offering a vision of the world as a web of reciprocal relationships rather than a collection of separate, lifeless things.