3.2 Religion as a ‘universal’

It was during the Enlightenment that the idea of religion as a universal aspect of human existence became firmly established. The assumption that religion exists in all societies led to the interpretation of a wide range of diverse and complex practices as ‘religions,’ even when people did not identify them as religious. This also gave rise to the classificatory category of ‘world religions,’ which typically include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. (For a critique of the ‘world religions paradigm’, see: Smith, 1993; Masuzawa, 2005; Fitzgerald, 2007; Cotter and Robertson, 2016).

Knowledges and practices of colonised Indigenous peoples were often described as either ‘devil-worship,’ as you learned from the example of Sámi joik, or placed into the categories ‘primitive religions’, ‘totemism’, ‘fetishism’, ‘tribal religions’, ‘primal religions’, ‘aboriginal religions’ and ‘shamanism.’ The notion of ‘devil-worship’ is a Christian-centric category, as it is rooted in Christian teachings that include the figure of the devil.

These so-called ‘smaller religions’ were juxtaposed against the religions of ‘civilised’ people, such as Christianity. In contrast, the religions of colonised Indigenous peoples, much like the people themselves, were positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy. Notably, these categories were imposed from the outside, rather than chosen by the people themselves, unlike Christianity or Islam, where followers commonly identify as Christian or Muslim.

The categorisation of diverse practices of colonised people, such as Sámi joik, into pre-defined religious categories illustrates how frameworks, predominantly rooted in European Christian perspectives, have shaped what counts as ‘religion’. A relatively limited, narrow understanding of religion was treated as a ‘universal’ and used to define, organise, and rank knowledges and the people who carry them.