紀要No.15 久保田カ

ブックの説明

アニミズム発生論理再考
-「霊魂」の人類学的思想史（１） タイラー一
The genetical logic of Animism-theory
-Anthropological history of the idea of the souls (1) Tylor-

久保田カ
KUBOTA Chikara

In this article, I tried to throw a new light on
the logical development of E.B.Tylor’s animismtheory.
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.