Are indigenous religions the religions practiced by Indigenous people or can these two categories be separated? Let’s discuss the matter further!

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 practised 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 the characteristics of an indigenous religion, James Cox identifies three main ones. The first focuses on ancestors, which is found in beliefs, rituals, and social practices and makes kinship relations significant. The second trait is the identification of one specific geographical area. This implies that the rituals and practices of indigenous religions are not universally applicable but rather contingent on the place within which they were developed and that have generated their cosmology. The key is also the means of transmission, for knowledge and practices are passed orally rather than via books. For Cox, indigenous religions are those practised by indigenous people. Still, this assimilation between the two is more clear-cut than 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 practised 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 practised by people who are not or no longer considered indigenous?

Lumping together indigenous religions and indigenous people risks impairing or influencing the understanding of both and flattening all the nuances derived from their fields of expression. For instance, since the definition of indigenous people is a political classification contingent on a specific place and its legislation, keeping the people entangled in the religion might compromise a full grasp of 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 with indigenous religions, such as the connection to the land, the centrality of kinship relations and a community-centred 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 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 keeping 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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References
Cox, J. L. (2007) From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Cox, J. L. (ed.) (2016) Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions, London, New York Routledge.

Harvey, G. (ed.) (2000) Indigenous Religions: A Companion, London; New York, Continuum.

Kraft, S. E., Tafjord, B. O., Longkumer, A., Alles, G. D. and Johnson, G. (eds.) (2020) Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks, 1st edition., Abingdon, Oxon; New York, Routledge.

Owen, S. (2016) ‘Druidry and the Definition of Indigenous Religion’, in Cox, J. L. (ed), Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions, London, New York, Routledge, pp. 81–92.

Puca, A. (2018) ‘Scientism and Post-Truth. Two contradictory paradigms underlying contemporary shamanism?’, Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion (JBASR), vol. 20, pp. 83–99 [Online]. DOI: 10.18792/jbasr.v20i0.30.

Puca, A. (2019) ‘The Tradition of Segnature: Underground Indigenous Practices in Italy’, The Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions, no. 7, pp. 104–123.