ABSTRACT
The term ‘traditional’ as used here to refer to the Australian Aboriginal, African, Melanesian, Maori and North, Mesoamerican and South American Indian religions covered in this section of the volume is not meant to suggest that these religions are static and unchanging, but is simply one way of distinguishing them from the major world religions which have spread themselves more widely across many different cultures and which tend to be, therefore, less confined to and by any one specific socio-cultural matrix. Indeed, it is very likely, given that they are, with some exceptions, in a sense non-literate and for that reason among others highly eclectic, that traditional religions have been more flexible and tolerant of change than those excluding, literate religions or religions of the book, the world religions as they are called, whose literary mode of supernatural direction and guidance leaves them in theory at least less room for manoeuvre. Moreover, while the use of the label traditional can be somewhat misleading, it is perhaps less so than primitive which has been applied to these religions, not only in the sense of early or primeval, but also in the sense of ‘lower’ and less ‘rational’ than the religions of what have often been described as the more ‘civilised’, ‘advanced’ societies. This view of traditional religions was based not on empirical data but on a theory of social and intellectual development or evolution current in the nineteenth century. According to this evolutionist approach, the term primitive referred on the one hand to a stage low down on the scale of social and intellectual development reached by prehistoric man and on the other to those contemporary, non-literate peoples whom, it was assumed, had remained at this same low social and intellectual level. It is clear that evolutionists of this mind tended to make too close a connection between social structure and thought, making development in the latter totally dependent on development in the former. In this century beginning after the First World War, and increasingly from the 1930s, researchers began to produce convincing evidence that not only undermined the two last mentioned propositions but also the premiss concerning the alleged inferiority of the ‘primitive’ mind, showing that non-literate peoples, though technologically very far from advanced, had developed, none the less, highly complex systems of thought and belief. 1 One ethnologist, the Austrian, Father Wilhelm Schmidt, went so far as to maintain that the hunting-gathering, forest Pygmies of central Africa, far from being animists or fetishists, later ‘degenerations’ of religion, were in fact monotheists, and that since they represented the oldest surviving culture on earth this was the earliest form of religion. It hardly needs to be said, however, that any attempt by the ethnologist or any other scholar to trace the earliest form of religion has encountered and will continue to encounter unsurmountable obstacles, the main one being the lack of historical data.
