Indigenous Religions, Global

Indigenous Religions as Global Traditions

Indigenous religions are practiced on every inhabited continent, even though indigenous peoples comprise [Page 742]a minority (approximately 4 percent) of the global population. In contrast to world religions that have expanded through missionary activity, colonial imposition, emigration and/or diasporic movement, indigenous religions tend to be rooted in specific communities and their surrounding landscapes. As such, their focuses tend to be more local and less universalizing.

Further, to separate “religion” from “daily life” when speaking of indigenous communities creates a false dichotomy foreign to most indigenous peoples’ conceptions of their purpose in and movement through the world. Indigenous religions conceive of the world as a unified whole in which humanity's place within the environment, as a members of its fauna responsible for its flora, lies suspended in a delicate balance maintained through respectful exchanges, ritual vigilance, and holistic interactions with the planet and its inhabitants.

Although indigenous peoples have various names for “the world” in their native languages, scholars attuned to the differences between indigenous and Western worldviews refer to indigenous outlooks using terms like life-world, lifeway, and cosmovision. These terms acknowledge indigenous peoples’ conceptual and perceptual integration of human, animal, and plant life, with features of the natural and built environment. For example, “cosmovision,” a term that derives from the work of historians of religions and arises in the work of scholars studying indigenous Mexican religions, recognizes the mutual (in)formation of the human body with the landscape and multiple senses of time in the Mesoamerican conception of the universe. Images like the frontispiece of the Codex Fejérváry Mayer encapsulate the precontact Central Mexican cosmovision through their simultaneous presentation of the ritual body, sacred structures, and calendric time. Contemporary Latina writers, artists, and performers, like Gloria Anzaldua, Norma Alarcón and Cherríe Moraga, emphasize bodily, spatial, and temporal experiences as significant, if not sacred, in their contemporary (re)interpretations of inherited cosmovisions. Like the terms life-world and lifeway, the term cosmovision serves not as a simple alternative to or synonym for “worldview,” but as an intentional marker of the conceptual, existential, and ontological differences between Western worldviews shaped by the European Enlightenment and indigenous perspectives on the world and its societies.

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