著者

久保田 力 クボタ チカラ Kubota Chikara

出版者

東北芸術工科大学

雑誌

東北芸術工科大学紀要

巻号頁・発行日

no.15, pp.80-99, 2008-03

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In this article, I tried to throw a new light on the logical development of E.B.Tylor's animism theory. There were still ambiguous phases to be revealed in his theory. From the fact that Tylor expanded his definition of the soul in his Primitive Culture of the second edition published in 1873, his original notion of the soul had a mainly dual-coded structure; <body/soul> and <life/ phantom> which were added to the first edition of his same book published two years before. The latter code, especially for him, comprised the genetical logic of the soul. In this case, however, the soul gained a new body or a pseudo body as soon as the life and the phantom were combined together. This is rather mysterious to us , but is the 'spiritual fact' for Tylor. Therefore, his famous definition of animism should be read as "the belief in the spiritual bodies" , as well as "the belief in the spiritual beings" . Such spiritual bodies can be realized as animated souls or virtual realities seen in the high-technological world of our times, so that they could be called 'primitive modern' in 'pseudo primitive culture'. As a matter of fact, we are, in this sense, living another revised Animism in terms of Tylor's definition. His opinion about the birth of the soul is to be compared with Nietzshe's nihilism claimed "Gott ist tot" . Tylor's animism is still alive and functions nowadays. It seemed to me that one of the main reasons why Tylor could not further develop and deepen his original idea of animism was due to the late appearance of rapid technological evolution of the cinematography or the motion picture invented in the end of the nineteenth century which made "ghost soul" and "apparitional soul" emerge in reality. Thus for Tylor and for us as well, soul is meant to be 'a thought pattern toward a body' as a psychological fact, while ritual is meant to be 'a behavioral pattern toward a soul' as a social fact.