Description
Offering a significant contribution to the emerging field of 'Non-Religion Studies', Religion and Non-Religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples draws on Australian 2011 Census statistics to ask whether the Indigenous Australian population, like the wider Australian society, is becoming increasingly secularised or whether there are other explanations for the surprisingly high percentage of Aboriginal people in Australia who state that they have 'no religion'. Contributors from a range of disciplines consider three central questions: How do Aboriginal Australians understand or interpret what Westerners have called 'religion'? Do Aboriginal Australians distinguish being 'religious' from being 'non-religious'? How have modernity and Christianity affected Indigenous understandings of 'religion'? These questions re-focus Western-dominated concerns with the decline or revival of religion, by incorporating how Indigenous Australians have responded to modernity, how modernity has affected Indigenous peoples' religious behaviours and perceptions, and how variations of response can be found in rural and urban contexts.
Table of Contents
Part I: Setting the Context
1. Introduction: The Australian Census, Religious Diversity and Religious ‘Nones’ among Indigenous Australians
James L. Cox and Adam Possamai
2. The Study of Religion and Non-religion in the Emerging Field of ‘Non-religion Studies’: Its Significance for Interpreting Australian Aboriginal Religions
James L. Cox
Part II: Non-religion among Aboriginal Peoples
3. Urban–Rural Geographies of Aboriginal Religious and Non-religious Identification
Awais Piracha, Helena Onnudottir and Kevin Dunn
4. Going with the Flow: Indigenous Non-religion, not Atheism
Alan Nixon
Part III: Hybridity and Religion among Aboriginal Peoples
5. Altjira, Dream and God
David Moore
6. The Strehlow–Hermannsburg/Ntaria Perplex: Translation in a Lutheran-Aboriginal Community
Hart Cohen
7. New Songs and Old Songlines: Aboriginal Christianity and Post-mission Australia
Steve Bevis
8. The Ties that Bind: The Importance of Religion and Community to the Non-religious
Theresa Petray
Part IV: Conclusion
9. Religion, Cultural Hybridity and Chains of Memory
Adam Possamai and James L. Cox
