From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions

• Main Author: Cox, James L. (R17621)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: U.K., Asgate 2007
• Subjects: XXXXXX - Unknown; Inupiat; Alaska
• Online Access: http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/533386; http://ezproxy.uws.edu.au/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/sydney/docDetail.action?docID=10211462

The primary aim of this book is to analyse critically the history of and the assumptions underlying the use of the category ‘Indigenous Religions’ as a distinct tradition alongside ‘world religions’. I have been motivated to write such a book for many years as a direct result of my involvement in planning academic programmes in religious studies in numerous teaching and research contexts. I have found in general (although there are notable exceptions) that in most university departments of religion and in the textbooks they employ, religions continue to be taught and written about according to long-established divisions defined along lines dictated by the ‘major traditions’, usually consisting of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism along with other combinations, sometimes including Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism or Sikhism. Typically, little attention is given to the study of traditions falling outside these main divisions. This omission has been noted recently by Jacob Olupona, who complains in the preface to his important edited book, Beyond Primitivism, that ‘while the “world” religious traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity are amply studied and represented in the academy, the study of “indigenous” religions is speciously cut off from religious studies’ (2004: xiv). Olupona’s observation underscores the point that if indigenous religious perspectives continue to be ignored, or at least marginalized in academic circles, a highly significant portion of the world’s religious adherents will be excluded from scholarly research and teaching in religious studies. This problem is not resolved simply by introducing courses into university curricula on Indigenous Religions. After some consideration, it soon becomes evident that to speak of Indigenous Religions as a single category is highly problematic, particularly since there are as many indigenous religious traditions as there are indigenous peoples, and because indigenous views often have been adapted into the world religions themselves. It would be impossible to cover adequately the religions of peoples who fit within such an all-encompassing classification. For this reason, where courses have been developed in universities in this field, they usually restrict their scope to the religions of peoples living within particular regions, such as African Indigenous Religions, or the beliefs and practices of Australian aboriginal peoples, or Native American religious traditions. In my own course on this topic in the University of Edinburgh, I focus on case examples, as I do in this book, based on my own research in Alaska and in Zimbabwe. Even this approach does not solve the problem, since in restricted local studies, numerous variations occur in the traditions of the people, as soon becomes evident when comparing, for example, death practices of the Inupiat of northern Alaska with the Yup’ik speaking peoples of the southwest region of the state. In Zimbabwe, important variations in ritual practice can be observed even amongst neighbouring communities, while seemingly contradictory explanations of events have been recounted to me by those I have interviewed within the same village. If local differences of such magnitude exist within the same region, the problems for teaching Indigenous Religions are exacerbated when university lecturers offer courses on African Indigenous Religions or Native American religious traditions, and even appear insurmountable when lumped under the generic category, ‘Indigenous Religions’.