ABSTRACT
The belief systems and social structures within indigenous societies revolve around ancestors, and hence, the religions of such societies are localized as opposed to universal. Indigenous societies also exclusively relate to a particular geographical place fixed in the tradition by their quasi-legendary myths. Unlike religions with universal cosmologies, one can never be converted into an indigenous religion, since ancestors only belong to precise kinship groups that operate within restricted and delineated spatial locations.
In this chapter, I apply this limited definition of indigenous religions to the regions of the South Pacific, often referred to as Oceania, by focusing on the Aboriginal religions of Australia, the M?ori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the indigenous religions of the southern Pacific stretching from Melanesia to the eastern Polynesian Islands. Of course, wide variations can be found among the societies within this vast area. In their ground-breaking book, The Religions of Oceania, Tony Swain and Garry Trompf (1995: 1) admit that the “south-west Pacific has hundreds of language and cultural groups, not to mention an immense history which will mostly remain forever concealed.” Australian Aboriginal societies are distinct from those in New Zealand and the South Pacific islands, but even within the Australian continent, indigenous societies and languages are numerous and diverse. Despite the wide variations within particular contexts across the whole of Oceania, I demonstrate in this chapter that it is possible to make limited generalizations based on the primary characteristics of indigenous religions: kinship and locality.
