Against 'indigenous religions' : a problematic category that reinforces the world religions paradigm

Over the last two decades the term 'indigenous religions' has become the preferred category for the traditions of small-scale kinship societies, replacing earlier categories such as 'primitive,' 'savage,' and 'primal' religions. Although this has followed more prevalent usage in postcolonial and socio-political discourses (exemplified in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of indigenous Peoples, 2007), in general the terminology has been employed by scholars of religion without any rationale beyond this basic correspondence. Thankfully recent years have seen more attention paid to the theoretical dimensions of the debate, particularly with regard to the historically-embedded problems attending any discussion of small-scale kinship societies. Amongst other works, James Cox's From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions (2007) stands as the most comprehensive justification for 'indigenous religions' as a category within the academic study of religion. The aim of Cox's justification is twofold. Primarily, the term is defined using a rigorous socio-cultural approach that prioritises two criteria: (1) the primacy of kinship relations, and (2) connection to place (addressing the fact that 'indigenous' has hitherto been based largely on non-empirical criteria like cross-cultural 'essences'). At a wider level, Cox's proposal is situated amongst the growing critique of the 'world religions' paradigm of religious studies, which continues to dominate how 'religion' is understood at both academic and popular levels (see Masuzawa 2005; Owen 2012; Cotter & Robertson 2016). Cox is particularly concerned to highlight how the world religions paradigm perpetuates the legacy of Western imperialism via a built-in marginalisation of small-scale religious traditions. The justification of 'indigenous religions' in From Primitive to Indigenous is therefore designed to: (a) promote the study of such groups as a legitimate topic within academic institutions; by (b) establishing the term using a robust social-scientific methodology; thereby (c) contributing to the agenda to displace the world religions paradigm at an institutional level (thus working against the ongoing legacy of Western imperialism in global cultural relations). This chapter engages these questions by arguing that while Cox's proposal offers some interesting ideas, key problems remain in terms of developing a feasible alternative to the world religions paradigm. In addition to the term's lack of macrohistorical applicability, the argument of this chapter is that 'indigenous religions' is ultimately only a replacement category to describe the same groups of people previously described as 'primitive' and 'primal' meaning that it fails to challenge the two-fold division that sustains the world religions paradigm (i.e. world religions/indigenous religions). The category still fits perfectly within the world religions paradigm, and is simply defined differently. While From Primitive to Indigenous stands as a methodological benchmark for the study of the localised ancestral-based traditions (see especially 53-94), the proposal is not sufficient for replacing the world religions paradigm with something substantially different - and it may even be counter-productive to that goal. If the world religions paradigm is to be challenged at an institutional level, then not just one category, but the entire set of categories used to divide human groups must be reconceived- for example: what do we call 'world religions' instead'? There are certainly suggestions in From Primitive to Indigenous for how this could proceed but Cox makes strong statements suggesting the proposal already achieves this. My contention is that an alternative model will be neither complete (nor even feasible) without a significantly wider set of considerations about new language, new categories, and new classificatory logics that could sustain the shift at a fuller paradigmatic level.