Scholars wrestling with animism today are untangling more than just whether rocks or rivers possess spirit. A central debate pitches relational ontology against residual “primitive” labels. Early 20th-century anthropologists often treated animism as a developmental footnote, but recent voices challenge that narrow framing. Graham Harvey and Nurit Bird-David advocate seeing animism as a living, dynamic web of relationships—no mere relic of the past.

At the same time, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism—originally drawn from Amazonian cosmologies—shook the field by suggesting that animals, plants and humans inhabit different “bodies,” each viewing the world through its own lens. Critics argue this risks exoticizing Indigenous thought, turning rich lifeworlds into academic curiosities. Tension simmers over whether perspectivism truly reflects local ontologies or whether it’s a clever scholarly construct that pushes the envelope too far.

Another flashpoint concerns scope. Is animism a universal human tendency—evident from Taiwanese plains to Scandinavian forests—or unique to particular cultural landscapes? Tim Ingold’s push toward “worldly anthropology” treats animism as a global, ongoing conversation about belonging. On the flip side, Indigenous scholars caution against flattening distinct traditions under one umbrella, especially when COP26 and COP28 climate dialogues have begun borrowing “animist” language to greenwash corporate agendas.

Methodological divides add fuel to the fire. Representationalists study myths and rituals from a distance; performative ethnographers embed themselves in everyday practices, learning to track footsteps of the forest spirits. The emergence of multi-species ethnography—spotlighted at the AAA 2024 meeting—further complicates definitions, demanding that researchers engage with more‐than‐human actors on their own turf.

Meanwhile, digital animism is tip-of-the-iceberg territory: AI chatbots prompted to role-play forest guardians, or NFTs titled “animated mountains,” blur lines between genuine cosmology and market trends. With global biodiversity loss spurring urgent calls for new worldviews, debates over what animism actually means have taken on fresh urgency—and nobody’s quite agreed on the final word.