RELIGIOUS CORE OF THE NEW ANIMISM

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of new animism, which is little studied in Ukrainian science, in search of religiosity and availability of a research field for religious scholars in the vision of this phenomenon that has been updated in recent decades. The main emphasis is placed on the analysis of new animism as such, in comparison with the most popular modern works on the definition of religion and one’s features. Research is made through the formation of a comprehensive definition of the phenomenon itself, which is described and “updated” mainly by anthropologists: Eduardo Vivierus de Castro in his work “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”, Nurit Bird-David in “Animism” Revisited. Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology”, by Tim Ingold in “The Perception of the Environment” and by Philip Descola in “Beyond Nature and Culture”, as well as a number of definitions of religion and its features that we find in works from sociology, such as “Theories of Primitive Religion” by Evans Pritchard, to religious studies, such as “Sacred and Profane” by Mircea Eliade. For this, the historical-comparative method, the phenomenological method, the method of analysis, the method of synthesis and the method of formal logic were used. The questions are raised about the presence in what is mainly called “ontology”, or in rare cases “epistemology”, and is also traced in many often different in their culture and mythological images of peoples, of: ritual behavior, rituals, long-term order, common symbols, as well as the Sacred, with its comprehensiveness and the transfer to man of the rules of cosmogonization of the Unknown chaos. Ultimately, the author comes to a conclusion about the real religiosity of the new animism as a phenomenon, despite the absence of such aspects familiar to us in religious phenomena as a clearly defined demarcation of the sacred and the profane, or the formalization of rituals into a coherent system, which is a consequence of the low level of institutionalization of the considered animistic religions.