Indigenous Religions, Globalization of

Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples is a generalized reference to thousands of small-to large-scale societies with distinct languages, kinship systems, mythologies, ancestral religious traditions, and homelands. Scholars, the United Nations, and the World Bank have ascribed this descriptive label to particular societies across the globe. This usage is now popularly appropriated as a collective-identifier by some local communities. Although precise demographic estimates are hardly available, these societies with diverse histories, cultures, and languages comprise between 300 and 350 million people on all continents. They form about 6% of the total world population with more than 5,000 distinct peoples in at least 72 countries. Indigenous peoples in sub-Saharan Africa include such large and small ethnolinguistic groups as the Yoruba, Bambara, Akan, Mandinka, Shona, Xhosa, Tuareg, Ogoni, Maasai, Khoisan, Herero, Kalahari Bushmen, Twa Pygmies, Mbuti, and Bakongo peoples. The Native American/American Indians encompass over 600 traditions, 8 major language families, and at least 3 distinct racial strains now lumped together. In present-day United States, the northern portion includes the states of Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and the northern portions of Nebraska. Euroasia is home to several indigenous peoples, including the Komi, Sorbs, Mari, Buryat, Kashubians, Circassian, Eskimos, and the Celtic peoples. Australasian examples include the Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Māoris, Native Hawaiians, Chamorros, and different Papua Melanesian groups such as the Dani and Korowai.

Indigenous societies range from those that were significantly exposed, in their past or current histories, to the colonial hegemony of other societies—European and American—through to those who as yet remain in comparative isolation from any such external influences. Their religions vary from traditions of hunter-gatherers, mountain/cave dwellers, agricultural communities, nomadic peoples, to large, complex societies, empires, and kingdoms. Numerically, they are significant in the demographical context of world religions; in fact, indigenous religions comprise the majority of the world's religions.

The religions of indigenous peoples are far from having any monolithic structure. Because indigenous peoples and their religious collectivities are characterized by a complex diversity, it will be problematic to homogenize all African, Native American, Australasian, and Euroasian religions into a single whole. Nevertheless, a common denominator of respective traditions is the affinities and dynamism that their historical specificities, cosmological systems, and ritual dimensions exemplify. Indigenous religions encompass phenomena that are primarily defined in terms of their orality, worldviews, and ritual orientation toward specific geocultural landscapes. Their histories, beliefs, and practices are encoded in and transmitted through oral traditions, myths, legends, art, paintings, sculpture, songs, and dances transgenerationally.

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