Are indigenous religions the religions practiced by Indigenous people or can these two categories
be separated? Let’s discuss the matter further!
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Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca, and welcome to my symposium. I’m a PhD and a
university lecturer, and this is your online resource for the academic study of esotericism,
shamanism, Paganism, indigenous religions, and all traditions that entertain some kind
of magical practice or magical thinking.
Today I will share with you the content of a contribution I wrote for the forthcoming
volume ‘Indigenous Religious Traditions in 5 minutes’, edited by Molly Bassett and
Natalie Avalos and published by Equinox. In my piece and in this video, I discuss whether
a religion needs to be practiced by indigenous people to be deemed an indigenous religion.
Some of the content and references will sound familiar as I already addressed them in a
previous video and yet I need to reiterate them as they are relevant to my argument.
Onto the topic now…
In an attempt to delineate what might be the characteristics of an indigenous religion,
James Cox identifies three main ones. The first being a focus on ancestors, which is
found in beliefs, rituals, social practices, and makes kinship relations of significant
importance. The second trait is the identification with one specific geographical area. This
implies that the rituals and practices, of indigenous religions, are not universally
applicable but rather contingent to the place within which they were developed and that
have generated their own cosmology. Key is also the means of transmission, for knowledge
and practices are passed on orally rather than via books. For Cox, indigenous religions
are those practiced by indigenous people but this assimilation between the two is not as
clear-cut as language may suggest and has been challenged by more recent scholarship.
The category of indigenous people is a political classification aimed at identifying, protecting,
and guaranteeing the rights of the people – now a minority - who inhabited a territory
before its mass colonisation occurred. According to the International Labour Organization and
the United Nations, Indigenous people are those who are original or first peoples of
a place where they have been colonised. This category seems to be solely applicable to
those countries where a massive wave of colonization occurred in a short period of time and on
such a large scale as to starkly demarcate a distinction between the before and after,
the outsiders and the native people, the colonizer and the colonized. Consequently, that of indigenous
people is an extremely useful political classification, which is contingent to specific geographical
areas and subject to the legislation of the country taken into consideration.
However, the category of indigenous people – as geographically contingent and politically
charged - appears insufficient by itself to understand what indigeneity is when it comes
to religion. If indigenous religions are those practiced by indigenous people would Christianity
be an indigenous religion when it becomes the dominant one within such communities?
And what about indigenous beliefs and rituals practiced by people who are not, or no longer,
considered to be indigenous?
Lumping together indigenous religions and indigenous people risks to impair or influence
the understanding of both and flattening all the nuances derived from their own fields
of expression. For instance, since the definition of indigenous people is a political classification,
contingent to a specific place and its legislation, keeping the people entangled to the religion
might compromise a full grasp on what an indigenous religion is in its own right, due to it being
dependent on one government’s law. This would hinder the appreciation of possible
underlying patterns across indigenous religions from different countries while, equally, limiting
the perception of indigenous people as those who have to engage in one specific set of
beliefs.
A European indigenous practice may still exhibit traits associated to indigenous religions,
such as the connection to the land, the centrality of kinship relations and a community-centered
approach. And even if we are to include, as a trait that of being “colonised”, there
is still the chance of encountering a cultural translation of such an element. As my fieldwork
with the Italian tradition of Segnature showed, there can be religious minorities forced to
adapt and remain quietly underground due to a dominant religion and cultural system that
oppose their existence. The minority living within a dominant culture, when it comes to
religion, might become a system of practices not accepted by a domineering socio-theoretical
framework that classifies them as “the other” from what is deemed to be the norm. For instance,
the predominant paradigm in the Western society endorses a pre-assumed rationalism that dictates
what is real, a.k.a. the measurable, repeatable and standardized, and what is not real. As
a consequence, those vernacular healers who cure illnesses are seen as delusional because
the “reality” of those practices is outright denied. So, when this latter trait is found
alongside a connection to the land and its spirits, a community-serving approach, and
oral transmission of knowledge, it becomes clear how disentangling indigenous religions
from indigenous people allows to keep the question open on whether such a religious
tradition may, in fact, classify as indigenous.
The conversation on what constitutes an indigenous religion is still ongoing within academic
circles and I argue, along with other scholars, that decoupling the category from that of
indigenous people would help the inquiry on the two groups, allowing for a more nuanced,
accurate, and contextual understanding of both.
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Bye for now.
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