Kinship and location : in defence of a narrow definition of indigenous religions

The category ‘Indigenous Religions’ has become widely accepted within university departments of religious studies as the preferred nomenclature to designate what Graham Harvey (2013a: 19) calls ‘the majority of the world’s religions’, perhaps not in terms of the number of adherents, but as a persistent force, either directly or indirectly, in the majority of societies around the world. Harvey (2013a: 19) explains that indigenous religions ‘present an elaborate and wonderful array of different ways of being human, doing ritual, inculcating ideas, dwelling in the world, imagining the cosmos and so on.’ If one pushes Harvey’s claims very far, it soon becomes apparent that what he means by indigenous religions needs careful consideration if the term is to be useful and not subject to multiple misunderstandings and misinterpretations. It is for this reason that scholars need to be quite precise about how they employ both parts of the classification, ‘indigenous’ and ‘religions’. In this article, I re-state my own precise definition of ‘religion’ and ‘indigenous’ as I have presented them in previous publications (Cox 2007: 53-93; Cox 2009: 99-116; Cox 2010: 1-23; Cox 2015: 5-23). I then summarise some of the chief criticisms that have been levelled against my definition of the terms considered together as ‘indigenous religions’, and conclude by offering a robust defence of my interpretation of the category.