Introductory Essay: Traditional Knowledge, Spirituality and Lands (original) (raw)

Introductory Essay to the special issue on Traditional Knowledge, Spirituality and Lands

In times like ours, when people are inundated with notions of consumerist identities, culture is often seen mainly as a resource to be tapped into for economic development. This certainly is true of blatant consumerist culture produced by such economic behemoths as Hollywood, but it is a narrow view on the importance and functions of culture. The objective of this issue of the International Indigenous Policy Journal is to demonstrate the radical importance of culture and spirituality in not only defining a people and their society but also in affecting their well-being and how these things are all interrelated.

Indigenousness and the Politics of Spirituality

This brief paper, published in Anthropology News, the newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, examines the link between notions of indigenousness and authenticity, as well as their use in the politics of contemporary spirituality. It discusses Native American critiques of Euro-American cultural appropriation, the difficulties in using the copyright model to safeguard intangible cultural heritage, and the role of the anthropologist in disputes over indigenousness, spirituality, and authenticity.

Indigenous Religion Paradigm: Re-interpreting Religious Practices of Indigenous People

Studies in Phikosophy, 2019

103 This paper proposes an indigenous religion paradigm as an alternative to world religion paradigm in examining varieties of religious practices of Indonesian indigenous peoples. Those varieties of religious practices have been dominantly described based on world religion paradigm. As a result, instead of being accounted as "religious", those practices have been labelled as "animistic", the ethnocentric theory of Tylor. Building on scholarship of indigenous religions, this paper will show that the world religion paradigm has misrepresented phenomena of indigenous religious practices, and argue that indigenous religion paradigm is more helpful and just to be employed. Indigenous religion paradigm is based on a cosmological concept that the cosmos is occuppied by different "persons" of human and non-human beings. Personhood is not identical to human beings, but perceived as extending beyond them. It is a capacity that may belong to the so-called "nature" (an essential category in a hierarchical cosmology along with "culture" and "supernatural"). This indigenous religion paradigm is used to specifically examine religious practices through which three groups of Indonesian indigenous peoples are engaged in environmental preservations and protections. The first is the Ammatoans of Sulawesi who have succeeded in preserving and protecting their customary forest from deforestation, the second is the Kend-hengs of Central Java who have been resisting a national cement company for their customary mountain and karst ecosystem, and the third is the Mollos of East Nusa Tenggara, eastern part of Indonesia, who succeeded protecting their costumary land by expelling marble mining companies. For those indigenous peoples, those costumary forest, mountain and land are "persons", whom they interrelate religiously for mutual benefits. They all engage in "inter-personal" relationship with those "natural" beings.

Native American Spirituality: History, Theory, and Reformulation

Throughout the twentieth century, the study of Native American religions has been dominated by non-native theoretical perspectives along three primary ethnographic vectors: studies of individual religious leaders or visible practitioners; intensive "cultural" studies of the role of rites, ceremonies and beliefs in a specific native community; and theoretical discourses that cut across religious practices in search of common unifying themes. The substance of these studies have been based primarily in the perceptions, observations, and theories of non-native observers. These non-native, written observations have then been used as primary sources for the study of native religions. Further, the context of Christian missionization, anthropological categorical reductions, and a surplus of historical narratives written by non-native observers has resulted in an externalized and fragmented view of native religions. The beliefs and practices have been recorded in limited selections in the form of monographs and field reports by those often unfamiliar with the language and thought worlds of native practitioners. Subsequently, there exists significant tensions between the actual spiritual beliefs and practices within a given native community and the external literature on the religion of that community authored by non-native scholars.

Chosen by the Spirits: Visionary Ecology and Indigenous Wisdom.

Teaching Mysticism, edited by Dr. William Parsons, Rice University. Oxford University Press, 2011: 121-137.

visionary ecology and indigenous wisdom L ee I rwin Teaching Native American religion and spirituality is a diffi cult and demanding task; one that requires constant attention to formative issues within Religious Studies and within the interdisciplinary context of Native Studies. Th ese diffi culties stem from shallow or artifi cial representations that mask a long history of brutal political and religious oppression, false characterizations, the denial or underevaluation of native epistemologies and spiritual values, and the constant tendency to rewrite, reinscribe, and reassimilate native beliefs into alien, nonnative constructs of meaning. Th e need to avoid essentializing attitudes and falsifying "trickster hermeneutics" ( Vizenor 1999 , 15-18) in native interpretations of religious practices creates a context of tension, uneasy resistance, and oft en anger and suspicion on the part of native persons toward any (false) claims to represent native religious thinking. As a scholar of native religious history, I am keenly aware of the ambiguity that informs a fi eld of study whose history is overshadowed by 400 years of oppression, denial, and marginalization through aggressive colonialism and government control, followed by an unexpected late-twentieth-century turn toward romanticization, commodifi cation, and a naive fi xation on native spirituality unmoored from its usual grounding in place, language, tradition, and required social relationships. An authentic context for teaching native religions requires conscious commitment to bring fully into view, for discussion and debate, the long and painful history of religious denial and constant mis/reinterpretation that has dominated most discussions of native religions .