Across many lands, the meeting between animist traditions and colonial power unfolded as a story of systematic marginalization. Colonial administrations frequently labeled local spirit practices as superstition or witchcraft, subjecting ceremonies and ritual specialists to legal prohibition and social stigma. Sacred groves, rivers, and mountains were often reclassified as empty or state-owned property, opening them to logging, mining, and other forms of resource extraction that damaged both the physical sites and the spiritual relationships bound to them. Traditional governance led by shamans, spirit mediums, or other ritual authorities was displaced by centralized structures more legible to colonial rule, weakening the social foundations of animist cosmologies. Under the weight of imposed legal and scientific frameworks, animist knowledge was relegated to the realm of the primitive or folkloric, even as it continued to shape how many communities understood land, kinship, and obligation.

Missionary activity, often intertwined with colonial expansion, intensified these pressures by directly targeting the spiritual heart of animist worlds. Conversion campaigns denounced ancestral veneration, spirit-possession, and offerings to nature beings as idolatry or demonic, urging converts to abandon traditional names, charms, healing practices, and festivals. Shrines, sacred trees, and ritual objects were destroyed or replaced by churches, mosques, and mission schools, while local converts were sometimes enlisted to suppress remaining practices among their own people. Yet animist traditions did not simply vanish; they adapted through syncretism and concealment. Spirits were reinterpreted as saints, angels, jinn, or demons, and many communities developed dual religious lives, publicly affirming the mission faith while privately maintaining ancestral rites and obligations to the more-than-human world.

Globalization added another layer of transformation, both corrosive and paradoxically enabling. Urbanization and wage labor drew people away from village-based ritual cycles and sacred landscapes, while state schooling and mass culture normalized secular and monotheistic worldviews that cast animism as backward or merely ethnic folklore. Modern medical systems and commercial development further displaced traditional healing and damaged sacred natural sites, contributing to the loss of oral traditions, ceremonial knowledge, and finely tuned ecological practices. At the same time, animist practices were increasingly reframed as indigenous culture or intangible heritage, sometimes leading to partial revivals, staged performances, or new forms of identity politics. In many places, what once appeared as an all-encompassing cosmology now survives as folk religion, underground practice, or a consciously asserted spiritual stance used to claim land, protect sacred sites, and articulate alternative ways of relating to the living world.