The Way Forward in the Religious Study of African Primal Religions1

Abstract

This article is written from a methodological viewpoint that must first be outlined. This begins with the assertion that the nature of the field of study must provide the major control over the methods employed. Religion is a human activity and experience that is liable to be interwoven with all aspects of human life, and its study therefore requires, sooner or later, all the human sciences. The study of religion is polymethodical: we can even speak of the physiology of religion when examining the interactions of the human body, various drugs and religious experience. More obvious methods, however, are those employed in the social sciences and in psychology. To these we should add the geographical study of religion which I would widen to include all interactions with the physical environment, under the term ecology of religion. Historical study is another inescapable discipline, to which must be added, although for rather different purposes, the philosophy of religion and the theology of religion. These methods mostly derive from the non-religious context and conditioning to which all religions are subject. Insofar, however, as the religious is a dimension or sphere of human life sui generis other methods are necessary, or at least other orientations and concerns, for the systematic study of the distinctive and peculiar features of religion. We have to study not only religion in its total milieu and that milieu itself, but also what it is that is interwoven with all the other dimensions of existence. To fail to take seriously either the religious itself, or the milieu itself, is to fall into a reductionism in one direction or the other and so into an unscientific distortion of the data. The study of religion therefore certainly needs the distinctively religious disciplines of the phenomenology and history of religions. By the phenomenology of religion I refer to the systematic