The Ainu people are indigenous to Japan (the term Ainu means “human”). They have lived mainly in Hokkaido (called Ainu mosir by the Ainu people) and the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Previously, they also lived in Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands (including the Chishima Islands). In the early 21st century, aspects of the Ainu people’s social lives were no different from those of other Japanese people because of historical colonization and forced cultural assimilation. However, Ainu religious practices have changed dramatically. The historical influences that have formed the Ainu culture and religion have been debated from various perspectives.
There are two main external influences on the historical formation of the Ainu religion. One is Okhotsk cultural influences, since similar designs are found among the Ainu and some ethnic minorities along the Amur River in the Siberian area, and the other is Japanese cultural influence.
Admittedly, the term religion is not appropriate to describe the Ainu religion and spirituality, which is based on the Ainu people’s close relationship with the kamuy (gods, deities) world through nature and by performing rituals and reciting sacred narratives. Ainu religion and spirituality was the fundamental principle guiding their lives as hunter- gatherers. At any specific historical moment, Ainu religion represents the accumulated social and historical expressions of the Ainu people accommodating and negotiating with traditional, inherited religious symbols and notions.
Aspects of the Ainu religion include domestic rituals of prayer to the goddess of fire, rituals for ancestral spirits, designs of clothes, tattooing, dancing and music, oral narratives, ritual hunting and communal ceremonies, shamanistic practices, and funeral rites. There are gendered aspects of the Ainu life and religion. While the Ainu men were responsible for offering prayers and performing these rituals, the Ainu women were known for shamanism and narrating kamuy-yukar, songs of kamuy, and offering prayers to ancestral spirits.
The Ainu religion is known for its ritual killing of a bear, that is, Iyomante in Ainu language. Iyomantemeans “sending it off,” signifying that the ritual sends the soul of the ritually slain animal back to the world of kamuy (deity or spirit). In order to grasp what it means, it is important to pay close attention to the Ainu’s indigenous religious notions about the relationship between kamuy and animals. Animal bodies or animal flesh are gifts for humans which kamuy embodies or wears in visiting the human world. Iyomante is often translated into “bear ceremony” in English or Japanese, but it is important to grasp the significance of the fact that the Ainu people use the term kamuy for both “bear” and “deity or spirit.” The Ainu people use the term Iyomante not only for the ritual killing of a bear, but also for ritual killings of other animals, such as a fox and an owl.
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Article
Ainu Religion
Takeshi Kimura
Article
Estevanico de Dorantes
Hsain Ilahiane
One of the most fascinating, and least understood, men in the history of the American Southwest was the Moroccan “slave” known as Estevanico de Dorantes in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New Spain. Estevanico was one of the four survivors of the Pànfilo de Narváez expedition, which sailed from Spain in 1527 with the objective of conquering Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The survivors were stranded on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and soon captured by Native Americans. After eight years of slavery, the expedition members escaped and traveled west, across western Texas, through the southwestern borderlands, and arrived in Culiacán, Mexico, in the spring of 1536. Three years later, Estevanico led the first Spanish expedition to Zuni lands and was the first Moroccan and African and non-Native American to set foot in what became Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the sixteenth century, Portugal occupied Morocco. Famine drove thousands of Moroccans to Spain and Portugal in various forms of servitude. The inhabitants of Azemmour—Estevanico’s home on the Atlantic coast—received permission from the Portuguese king, Don Manuel, to emigrate to Spain. People left Morocco in search of a better life in the Iberian Peninsula. This suggests that Estevanico might have emigrated as a servant, an indentured laborer, or an employee in search of economic opportunities. He may not have been a slave at all but instead a political or economic refugee since the Azemmouri people sided with the Portuguese invaders. Despite Estevanico’s role in Spain’s age of exploration and imperialism in the Americas, historical accounts are silent about him except to note that he was a slave who accompanied Fray Marcos De Niza on his travels through the American Southwest. Nevertheless, Estevanico remains an important figure in the social history of Pueblo Native Americans.
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Aboriginal Religions in Australia
David Moore
Aboriginal Religions are the Indigenous religions of Australia. There are a diverse range of religions throughout Australia, with religion defined as the “transmission of authoritative traditions.” Despite change and disruption in the past two and a half centuries of European occupation and colonization, Aboriginal Religions retain their distinctiveness and vitality. This article explores some of the common aspects of the Aboriginal Religions of Australia. These are the importance of the land and the sacred places of that land. Aboriginal Religions can best be researched by phenomenological approaches which are based upon language.
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Indigenous Knowledges
Paul L. Gareau and Molly Swain
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge that represents the complex ways of understanding the world. It is defined as a systemic and reasoned discernment that generates a “justified belief” or “truth” distinct from “subjective opinion” and is based on ontological understandings of one’s existence or the “nature of being.” Epistemology and ontology for Indigenous nations/peoples is recognized as a holistic and plural concept of onto-epistemologies whereby understanding and being are shaped by experiential knowledges in traditional, storied places where distinct collectivities of humans and other-than-human nations/peoples intersect, interact, and coexist. Indigenous onto-epistemologies or knowledges are often referred to as lifeways to better describe the relational ethos of Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing. However, these relational knowledges are systematically overlooked and/or denigrated in settler societies, which position Indigenous knowledges as cultural opinions rather than reasoned truth. This discrepancy reflects a long history of settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism rooted in Western European values of moral exclusivity, possessiveness, logocentrism, anthropocentrism, and androcentrism. These values and worldview continue to be deployed onto Indigenous nations/peoples and communities/collectivities through colonialism and racialization in ways that impede kinship relations and storied knowledges.
Indigenous knowledges can be understood as the multivariate experiences of thinking, being, and relating between sovereign Indigenous nations/peoples and communities/collectivities. Based in critical Indigenous theory—itself largely shaped by the experiences of Indigenous scholars and Indigenous nations/peoples living with and resisting colonial nation-states in the Global North and Oceania—this discussion is about framing the definitions of epistemology and ontology in ways that are meaningful and resonant to Indigenous nations/peoples’ relational ethos and worldviews. This can be accomplished by situating and unpacking the dominant definitions of epistemology through modern Enlightenment values, settler colonialism, and White possessiveness, followed by outlining an interpretative framework called a hermeneutics of relationality. This hermeneutical framework is a generalizable and critical approach to encapsulating an understanding of Indigenous knowledges as relational, situated, collective, and co-constitutive.
Article
Indigenous Religions in Brazil
Mark Münzel
In the past, Indigenous religions often served as a black box for various scholarly disciplines. For example, they have been seen as an example of psychopathic complexes or for the original primacy of the collective over the individual. With the emergence of the New Age movement, shamanism in particular has become an object of unscientific projection. In the process, on the one hand Indigenous religions were hold in higher esteem, but on the other hand the character of their reflections on time and the nature of the world and, more often than not, very abstract concepts are reduced to happiness.
Approaching the issue from the perspective of mythical indigenous narratives has the advantage that Indigenous people, the tellers of these myths, speak for themselves. Of course, when they come into contact with Western scholars (who record their myths) or missionaries (who are also interested in indigenous systems of beliefs), they too naturally absorb outside influences: A clinically pure Indigenous religion, so to speak, is an illusion.
Fortunately, myths, whether recorded by Indigenous scholars, or told to researchers who come from outside, are usually not dry factual reports, but literary works, today often aimed at Indigenous children and adolescents, but often enough also as literature for adults—Indigenous religions appear to us in literary guise.
Brazil’s Indigenous nations represent a large number of very different cultures and traditions. Since no central authority existed prior to European colonization, and since the state institutions in Brazil that have since been established are not responsible for Indigenous systems of beliefs, these various Indigenous religions have never been unified, even if they have been subject since the early days of colonialism to uniform external influences (above all the Christian mission and the Western school system).
To put it bluntly, one could say that the only thing they have in common is that they are different from one another. Still, some broad similarities can be found, and common traits that apply to a larger number, though never all, Indigenous systems of belief, myths, and rituals can be identified.
One of these widespread similarities is the idea that humans are an unreal illusion reflecting another world and another time. Another trait is a belief in culture heroes who long ago laid the groundwork for the situation in the 21st century and then left the people to their own devices. The world they built will not last forever, but will one day collapse in on itself in a catastrophe, just as other worlds have collapsed before ours. Ultimately, all relations are unstable, enduring merely for more or less long or short periods of time. The only thing permanent is the change.
Article
Materiality and the Study of Indigenous Religions
Amy R. Whitehead
Academic attention to Indigenous religions has grown steadily since the 1990s in parallel with increasing attention to the lived, material dimensions of religions. The global emergence of the subfield of material religion in the late 1990s began to highlight the often taken-for-granted and marginalized material aspects of religions by placing religious “things” front and center within cutting-edge debates. Paying scholarly attention to geographical sites, temples, ritual tools, texts, clothing, language, the body, and the things that people use to live their religions with and through began to unmask a scholarly heritage that privileges mind over matter, subjects over objects, culture over nature, the sacred over the profane, and metaphysics over the tangible. Simultaneously, the 1990s saw the re-emergence of Indigenous religions as an area of interest for the study of religions. These two trajectories, while at first seemingly unrelated, are both responding to a transformative and decolonizing shift in the study of religions, where researcher positionality, institutional structures, power relations, and processes are being critically and practically reassessed. Features of this shift include a series of moves in scholarship that problematize the discipline’s modern, Enlightenment, colonial legacy; emphasis on metaphysics, texts, and beliefs in the academic study of religions; and the world religions paradigm. Combining the fields of lived and material religion with the study of Indigenous religions, beginning with their related historical trajectories, offers rich and complex possibilities for the future innovative development of theories and methods. These theories and methods extend beyond established, anthropomorphic positions about material cultures, offering relational theories (such as the new animism and the new materialism) that allow Indigenous religious materialities to reveal new understandings about the ontological and other potentialities of so-called “things.”
Article
The Revival of Animism in the 21st Century
Kocku von Stuckrad
The academic concept of “animism” has a long and complicated history. Born from a colonial setting around 1900, it was used to identify premodern or “primitive” understandings of certain nonhuman entities or objects as being alive, ensouled, and agentic. Because of its European depiction as a “failed ontology,” and the heavy colonial baggage this depiction entails, the concept was criticized and went almost out of use in mainstream anthropology and the academic study of religion. Around the turn of the 21st century, however, a different interpretation of animism was (re)introduced, which focused on animism as a relational approach to the world rather than as ontological claims about nonhuman entities. Many scholars in the emerging field of “new animism” base their considerations on spiritual practices in Europe and North America that use the concept of animism in a positive way. This is true for many forms of paganism, nature-based spiritualities, and environmental activism. In a parallel, and in fact intertwined, movement, academic theories have been developed across disciplines and intellectual traditions that conceptualize relationality, nonhuman agency, and entanglements of life forms in a way that strives to overcome influential binaries such as subject–object, nature–culture, mind–matter, or human–nonhuman. These theories, in turn, materialize in literature and art, and they influence political and spiritual practice in many ways. In what can be called animism’s double-bind, new animism is a mode of critique of exactly those binary constructions that originate in European hegemonic thinking. While the idea of animism, due to its colonial legacy, should no longer be applied as a generic concept to a particular “type” of religion, its revival in Euro-American discourse at the turn of the 21st century can, ironically, be interpreted as a subversive attempt to decolonize the hegemonic tradition that constructed European (white, male) humans as detached from the rest of planetary life and as the pinnacle of evolution and creation.
Article
The Study of Indigenous Religions
Gregory D. Alles
The most important question to start with in considering the study of Indigenous religions is: What do the terms study, indigenous, religion, and Indigenous religions mean? There is no universally agreed upon definition for any of these terms or their combination, but one common understanding sees the study of Indigenous religions as the examination, in an academic context, of the religions of Indigenous people, prototypically, but not exclusively, people displaced by European settler colonialism. In Western European and North American universities this study has been dominated by scholars whose nations engaged in colonialism, and it has produced any number of theories attempting to understand and explain the religious practices and ideas of people who have generally been deemed “other.” As in other disciplines and fields, the Western European and North American tradition of study has exerted a powerful influence on scholars elsewhere, such as South Asia. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, Indigenous people began to develop their own methods of study, known as Indigenous research methodologies. Among other things, these methodologies emphasize the active involvement of Indigenous people as research participants rather than just objects of study, engage in research that addresses the concerns of Indigenous people, and insist that the benefits of research should be shared with the people being studied. They also often employ various methods and theories rooted in their own traditions. In practice, the mutual relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and the people whom they study vary widely, as do the topics that scholars choose to study.
Article
Indigenous Religion of Hawaiʻi
Marie Alohalani Brown
Hawaiian religion is a nature religion in that the island environment is the matrix of traditional Hawaiian beliefs and belief-related practices. For this reason, nature as a whole is considered sacred. Creation chants in the form of genealogies establish the Hawaiian people as the younger relatives of these other-than-human entities termed “akua” that comprise and populate this island world. There are countless akua, thus making it impossible to know all their names and functions. To address this issue, a prayer acknowledges and honors these innumerable akua and the existence and vastness of the potentially significantly unknown. Hawaiian religion is practice driven. While a great number of deities are recognized and honored, not all of them are actively worshipped. Practitioners focus their attention on the akua who are in one way or another relevant to their occupation or craft. In addition to the belief in nature deities, Hawaiian religion is informed by other foundational concepts such as kino lau (the forms a deity may assume or the forms with which a deity is symbolically associated), ʻaumākua (ancestral deities), mana (a complex concept broadly related to “power”), and kapu (prohibition) related to the sacred. These concepts are inextricably intertwined in Hawaiian religion. In an earlier time in Hawaiʻi’s history, this religion regulated nearly every aspect of life—familial, societal, political, and economic. Thus, Hawaiian religion and Hawaiian culture are nearly indistinguishable.
Article
Indigenous Religions in West Africa
Katharina Wilkens and Mariam Goshadze
Reaching from the Sahara Desert and the savanna in the north to the densely wooded areas of the Atlantic coast, West Africa is a region marked by a history of long-distance trade, large empires, European colonialism, and postcolonial nationalism. Indigenous religions here consist of a number of functionally differentiated institutions, societies, and ritual performances that vary considerably across the region. These may include lineage rituals of ancestor veneration, professional praise singers and narrators, mask societies, burial rituals, healing, puberty rites and marriage, societies dedicated to various divinities, witchcraft, annual festivals, and divination. With concepts like “fetishism” and “animism,” Western scholarship on African religions has left a deep epistemological imprint on how it has been understood. The current usage of both terms “indigenous” and “traditional” in reference to African religions reflects the variety of approaches toward decolonizing Western theories of religion and culture that emphasize different aspects of empirical research, discursive identity, and the relationship to Christianity (and to a lesser extent to Islam). Precolonial sources on the subject are rare, but some do exist, including Islamic textual sources, oral (mostly epic) literature, and archaeological data. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the changing perceptions of Indigenous religions in the face of Christian missionization and European colonialism are marked by a shift from the importance of ancestral rituals in public offices to nationalistic idealization of traditions as a means of ethnic integration. During the course of the 20th century, the neglect of, or even antagonism toward Indigenous religious expressions has led to a culturalization of ritual performances and narratives, on the one hand, and to the reactive formation of neotraditional religious groups, on the other hand. Confronted with attacks launched by Pentecostalism and Salafism, traditional religions remain relevant as actors, and observers point out their contribution to modern, decolonial societies entangled in diasporic and world history.
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