ABSTRACT
The US scholar of religion Greg Johnson notes in his 2005 Encyclopedia of Religion article, the term “indigenous” is ambiguous, in that it is “a term of self-designation; an analytic concept; and a legal construction”. He further describes the term as “a self-referential metaphor” that becomes meaningful “precisely because of the gaps and overlaps between its assumed meanings.” From the Latin indigena, literally meaning “in-born,” the English adjective, “indigenous” has, since about the mid-twentieth century, increasingly replaced earlier use of the word “native.” The latter term, from the post-Classical Latin nativus, referred at first to one who is born into bondage, though, by the twelfth century in English, it comes to mean one who is born into or at a particular place, in opposition to those who are not and who therefore arrived from elsewhere.
