Traditional African religions
The beliefs and practices of African people are highly diverse, including various ethnic religions. Generally, these traditions are oral rather than scriptural and are passed down from one generation to another through folk tales, songs, and festivals, and include beliefs in spirits and higher and lower gods, sometimes including a supreme being, as well as the veneration of the dead, and use of magic and traditional African medicine. Most religions can be described as animistic with various polytheistic and pantheistic aspects. The role of humanity is generally seen as one of harmonizing nature with the supernatural.
Local ceremony in Benin featuring a zangbeto.
An early-20th-century Igbo medicine man in Nigeria, West Africa
Traditional Vodun dancer enchanting gods and spirits, in Ganvie, Benin.
Traditional Koku dancer
Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words—as being animated, having agency and free will. Animism is used in anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many Indigenous peoples in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Animism is a metaphysical belief which focuses on the supernatural universe : specifically, on the concept of the immaterial soul.
Edward Tylor developed animism as an anthropological theory.
Five Ojibwe chiefs in the 19th century. It was anthropological studies of Ojibwe religion that resulted in the development of the "new animism".
Animist altar, Bozo village, Mopti, Bandiagara, Mali, in 1972
Ingrown sculpture of human head in a tree trunk in Laos.