Geography
Ethnic Religions
Ethnic religions are belief systems that are closely tied to a particular ethnic group or culture. They are often passed down through generations and are deeply ingrained in the traditions and customs of the community. These religions typically do not seek converts and are closely linked to the identity and heritage of the people who practice them.
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7 Key excerpts on "Ethnic Religions"
eBook - PDFMy Neighbours God
Interfaith Spaces and Claims of Religious Identity
- Andreas Kunz-Lübcke(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
Many have questioned the primary sense of religious iden- tity. Some perceive it as a religious affiliation or identity with a group of people in terms of values, traditions and belief in a system. In this context, 12 Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism…, 15–16. 13 Esman, Milton J.: Ethnic Politics. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London 1994, p.1. 14 Rubinoff A.G., “Multilateral Implications…,” 2, 4. Ethno-Religious Space 243 it is worthwhile to consider the nature of religion itself. According to sociologists and social anthropologists religion is a universal phenom- enon whether the secularists repudiate it or not. It is diverse in terms of beliefs, rituals and spiritualism and symbolic imagery. Das in this respect examines the three universally accepted forms of religion for an attempt to comprehend religion. Because of their reference to sacredness to moral principles rather than to a deity Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism and Buddhism are categorized as ethical religions while Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism as theistic religions whose believers worship one or several gods. The third religion is animist religion whose believers ascribe to spirits. 15 Given this orientation religion and religious identity suggests to be plain and clear. Yet religion is anything but obvious and the concept over the term religion is still contentious. For a deeper study of religion and the identities it evolves from it is essential to decentralise their identities and return them to a boarder inner social-cultural context. In this respect the tribal religious traditions in different parts of the world could also be accommodated in the wider perceptive of religion and its traditions. The indigenous people of Northeast India converted to different religions and influenced by various cultural revolutions, but they in no way disintegrated from their fundamental tribal religious sentiments and ethical beliefs.
eBook - PDFEthnic, Racial and Religious Inequalities
The Perils of Subjectivity
- M. Macey(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
(2007: 154) have distinguished in this sense between religious ‘community’, which involves a looser form of identifi- cation, and religious ‘membership’, which requires a stricter test. It is here that the connection between religious and ethnic identities enters the picture. Put at its simplest, the generally agreed definition of ethnicity in the social sciences centres on the shared cultural charac- teristics of human groups, including factors such as language, customs and, more problematically, a sense of shared history, nationality or community, formed by narratives of common descent, bonds of mutual relationships and common circumstances or fate. Anderson (1991) has pointed out that these features of ethnicity can be either real or imag- ined, but they create powerful historical forces in either guise. Since these shared cultural characteristics often include religion, with the shared history being in part a history of religion, religious allegiance often forms part of ethnicity. Religious identity would be seen as neces- sary to ethnic identity in such cases. Conversely, there are instances in which ethnic identity (in the shape of common descent) is regarded as necessary to religious identity, as, for example, the Orthodox insistence on the inheritance of Jewish identity through the female line. In addition, religions typically have long histories of give and take with their social environments, and are often carried sociologically by popular customs and beliefs as much as by elite discourses and prac- tices. It follows that the traditions are likely to be experienced as whole cloth, with the religious and the cultural elements closely interwoven. 10 Ethnic, Racial and Religious Inequalities It may take an analytical effort, imposed from outside the lived experi- ence, to distinguish the two, so that religious and ethnic identities may not be separated clearly in the minds of those who possess them.
eBook - PDFVisualizing Human Geography
At Home in a Diverse World
- Alyson L. Greiner(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Certain African and Roman Catholic traditions became fused as a result of the African slave trade, giving rise to the syn- cretic religions of Santeria in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil (Figure 5.1). A religion might also provide an explanation of the beginning of the world, or cosmogony. Cosmogonies are important because they can influence people’s sense of be- longing and attachment to place. Similarly, a religion may be associated with a code of behav- ior, morals, or ethics. For their ad- herents, then, religions represent or express certain truths. Like language, religion is an- other facet of culture. Religion shapes the identity of individuals and communities. It helps people define who they are, how they be- have, and how they interpret the world. Religious behavior may in- clude the practice of rituals such as prayer, the maintenance of dress codes, or the celebration of reli- gious festivals. Piety (or piousness) means to be deeply devoted to a religion. Religions can be loosely grouped into two broad catego- ries: universalizing and ethnic. Distinctions between these monotheistic The belief in or devotion to a single deity. polytheistic The belief in or devotion to multiple deities. atheistic The belief that there is no deity. 114 CHAPTER 5 Geographies of Religion Religion in Global Context 115 symbols, and rituals infuse the political culture of an area, we refer to this as civil religion. For example, on the Great Seal of the United States, the Latin phrase Annuit Cœptis states: “He [God] has favored our un- dertakings.” (This is visible on the back side of a dol- lar bill.) We will discuss civil religion in later sections, but first we need an introduction to some of the major faiths mapped in Figure 5.2. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sometimes classified as Abrahamic faiths. Although the specific details differ, each of these faiths has a historical association with Abraham, who is thought to have lived in the Middle East in the 19th century bce.
- James A Beckford, Jay Demerath, James A Beckford, Jay Demerath(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
In other words, the label is always historically contingent. Harold Abramson (1980), in an entry on ‘Religion’ in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, made the following assertion: Religion becomes a major and consequential reason for the development of ethnicity. The Armenian Orthodox, the Chinese Buddhists, the Finnish Lutherans, the German Jews, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Sephardic Jews, the Southern Baptists, the Spanish-speaking Catholics, and the Utah Mormons are only a few of the groups in which ethnicity and religion are inextricably linked. Given what Abramson considers to be the rather broadly conceived linkage between religion and ethnicity in the American case – primarily a consequence of being a settler nation where a vast majority of the population is composed of immigrants and their offspring – he moves beyond the earlier singular notion of religio-ethnic as an adequate concept to capture that variability by postulating four types of relationship see Figure 23.1. The first type most closely approximates what the original term means. In this type, reli-gion serves as the ‘major foundation’ of ethnic-ity. The examples he cites are Jews, Hutterites, Amish, and Mormons (Abramson 1980: 869). Leave aside the fact that the Mormons are a suspect example, for it is not clear in what ways they ought to be treated as an ethic group at all. What he appears to have in mind is a sense of ethnic peoplehood inextricably rooted in a particular religion. RETHINKING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND RELIGION 493 In the second type, ‘a particular ethnic group may be grounded in a relatively unique religion, but one that has a more marked asso-ciation with a distinct territory or homeland, a particular language, or an evolving sense of nationality’ (Abramson 1980: 870). The exam-ples cited include Dutch Reformed, the Church of England, the Serbian Orthodox, and Scottish Presbyterianism.
eBook - PDFUnderstanding Geography and War
Misperceptions, Foundations, and Prospects
- Steve Pickering(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
CHAPTER 5 Religious Geopolitics and the Geopolitics of Religion RELIGION: DIFFICULT FOR GEOGRAPHERS The geopolitics of religion remains surprisingly understudied and one of the reasons for this is that religion itself has been a difficult area for geographers to study; similarly, geographers are few and far between in religious studies. The work of Sopher (1967, vii) in which he refers to his attempt to map this ‘frontier territory’ is pioneering in this regard and while Yorgason and Dora (2009, 629) acknowledge that much progress has been made since Sopher’s work, they still ponder whether religion remains the last terra incognita for geographers. Kong (2001, 212) argues that while geographers have easily incorporated ideas like race, class and gender as social cleavages into their work, religion has been either forgotten or confused with race. Similarly, Tse (2013, 201) argues that religion ‘remains an undefined “black box” in human geography.’ Nevertheless, much has been achieved since Sopher (1967) and Kong (2010, 756) goes as far as to ask whether the geographical study of religion has finally arrived. International relations (IR) scholars have also had difficulty adapting religious analysis to their work, partly because of structural biases (similar to those discussed in the Preface), and partly because it is difficult for scholars from a rationalist tradition to relate to faith-based approaches. This is especially true of European scholars trying to understand the rela- tionship between religion and politics in the constitutionally secular USA: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 S. Pickering, Understanding Geography and War, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52217-7_5 115 116 S. PICKERING see the excellent work by Müller-Fahrenholz (2006).
eBook - PDFRegionalism without Regions
Reconceptualizing Ukraine's Heterogeneity
- Ulrich Schmid, Oksana Myshlovska, Ulrich Schmid, Oksana Myshlovska, Oksana Myshlovska, Ulrich Schmid(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Central European University Press(Publisher)
Contrary to expectations, religion is not, however, a significant contributing factor in the creation of regionalism or regional identities. Rather, as it has in the past, religion continues to shape the cul-tural geography of Ukraine and to contribute to the cultural and political diversity found in Ukraine. Religion and nationhood Nationhood is based upon the degree to which various regions are suc-cessfully united into a whole that is imparted with meaning sufficient to generate allegiance to a particular ruling authority. Especially for more recently created nations, such as Ukraine, religion assumes a prominent role in processes of nation building when several dynamics are operative: when religion is the central element in a protonational mythology; when religion provides the emerging nation with its symbolic boundaries leading to the dissolution of earlier collectivities; when a community has lost other important identity markers, such as common language or shared territory; when an ethnic identity coincides with a religious affiliation; and, finally, when a nation has been deprived of political institutions, thereby leaving religious institutions as one of the few bases for nation building (Greenfeld 1992, 7). Religion has figured, and continues to figure, into each of these dynamics of nation building in Ukraine. 249 6. Religion and the Cultural Geography of Ukraine The first leaders of the Ukrainian national movement understood the significance of religion for strengthening Ukrainian national identity but they conceived of its usefulness in a variety of ways. The ethnogra-pher Panteleimon Kulish argued that religion was an important domain of daily life in which the particularities of Ukrainian language, customs and beliefs were expressed and preserved.
eBook - PDF- Stephen Pihlaja(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
3 Ethnography Vally Lytra 3.1 Background, History, and Key Terms Religion is central to the everyday experiences of many individuals and communities worldwide. As a force for learning and socialisation and as an important marker of identity, it can provide a sense of membership and belonging within and across generations. The social and cultural practices in religions are shaped by individual as well as institutional, social, and ideo- logical forces and processes, instantiated locally, translocally, and globally. Specific ways of utilising language and literacy can also be seen as a social practice that individuals draw upon for meaning making and building social relationships. Language and literacy practices are then historically situated and embedded within power relations and societal discourses of distinction, where some languages and literacies become dominant and others are frequently silenced or considered irrelevant or problematic. An emergent body of interdisciplinary scholarship has examined the inter- section of language, literacy, and religion from a social and cultural practice perspective. Methodologically, this body of research uses ethnography as a key conceptual approach to understanding social interaction for systematic know- ledge building and the generation of theory. Although recognising the intellec- tual antecedents of ethnography in anthropology and sociology, there is no consensus about what counts as ethnography (Hammersley, 2018). Simply put, ethnography refers to the description and interpretation of people’ s behaviours and attitudes to make sense of the world from their perspectives.
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