For example, if you hunt, especially if you derive your main subsistence from hunting, it is not a bad bet to surmise that the prey you are pursuing has an interiority of its own — whether you call it cunning, a soul or a theory of mind — and that you should look at yourself as if you were that prey so as to organize your moves accordingly (i.e. deceiving the animal by not doing what it would expect you to do from the position where it may become aware of your presence). Systematized in discursive form, in myth and ritual statements, this perfectly normal inference about the dispositions of an animal, and the equally normal process of empathy with a higher form of animal life, constitutes the experiential basis of what I have called animism, i.e. the assumption that, under certain circumstances, non-humans of various kinds behave as if they had an intentionality analogous to the one humans believe they are endowed with (Descola 2005a, chapter 6).
This article is an alternative reading of Philippe Descola’s ontological scheme, arguing that animism, totemism, and analogism are but three forms of animism, namely communal, segmentary, and hierarchical. Often found in various degrees of salience in the same society, all moreover are versions of an anthropomorphism well known as our own default scheme of things