Ancestor Religion Research Articles

Notions of Freedom in the Rise of a Sumbanese Christianity (1902–2002)

Abstract The Dutch neo-Calvinist mission (Zending) on Sumba in Indonesia, an area known for its Marapu ancestor religion, started in 1902. The independent Sumbanese church (Gereja Kristen Sumba, GKS) was established at the 1947 Synod. One century later, by 2002, two out of three inhabitants were Christian. The research question is whether the rise of a vital GKS was facilitated by education and ‘antithetical’ notions of freedom offered by neo-Calvinist Zending. The answer is that the Zending empowered Sumbanese Christians to decide for themselves whether to preserve traditional customs (adat), so they could build the GKS from the bottom up. This answer is based on archival material – including the unexplored archive of Rev. P.J. Lambooij – and on a dozen semi-structured interviews with Sumbanese spokespersons in 2006, 2016 and 2019. Macro-level explanations – capitalism, modernity, or colonialism – hardly appear to account for the transformation to Sumbanese Christianity.

The Authorship of Sayyidī Shaykh Muhammad ʿUthmān ʾal-Burhāni (d. 1403/1983) and the Impact of his Religious Dissemination through Divine Proximity

In researching the rich and diverse Sufi culture of the Arab world, I came across the unpublished work of Sayyidī Shaykh Muhammad ʿUthmān ʾal-Burhāni. (d. 1403/1983). This was surprisingly unexplored in previous research, and no formal publication capturing this fascinating work has been released yet. Sayyidī through these teachings significantly contributed to the development of religious dissemination, which gained a massive following in Sudan and Egypt and ultimately reached followers all over the world. His teachings go beyond emphasizing mere divine proximity for Muslims but they also provide a profound sense of purpose for individuals who still hold onto their ancestor's religion, inspiring them to embrace Islam. This serves as a guiding light, directing followers towards the path of divine legislation (sharīʿah) through the power of divine love (ʾal-ḥubb), while the cultivation of this love propels individuals towards the ultimate divine reality (ḥaqīqa). In addition, he answered questions in his sermons (durūs) from various fields of knowledge, and for this reason, many scholars of his time including from ʾal-ʾAzhar sought to attend his gatherings, where he spoke about the sciences of the Qurʾan from different aspects. This research intended to unveil the impact of his religious dissemination and the introduction of his authorship, which has yet to be documented.

The Meaning of Water in Javanese Padusan and Japanese Misogi-Harai Rituals

Indonesia and Japan are two countries known for their high regard for culture and tradition, with no exception for those associated with religious rituals. In Japan, the Shinto religion is highly renowned for being the existing and believed ancestor religion. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, Islam is the largest religion that has indirectly influenced the cultures and traditions developed in society. Both Islam and the Shinto have a purification ritual with water as their medium, Padusan and Misogi-Harai, respectively. This study focuses on three things, i.e., the history, time of performance, and ritual procedure, to examine the corresponding meaning of the water as the media in both rituals. The method used to collect data is the literature study, and the data is then analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. As a result of the three aspects studied, two similar meanings of water to the ritualistic purpose were discovered, i.e., purifying the soul from impurities/sin and returning the spirit to devotion to God.

Meaning and Controversy within Chinese Ancestor Religion, written by Paulin Batairwa Kubuya

Meaning and Controversy within Chinese Ancestor Religion, written by Paulin Batairwa Kubuya

"한국유교 종족의례의 특징과 의미: 시제(時祭)의 ‘순례화’와 ‘조상종교론’을 중심으로"

"한국유교 종족의례의 특징과 의미: 시제(時祭)의 ‘순례화’와 ‘조상종교론’을 중심으로"

Is Ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias

Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among “Austronesian” religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of “traditional knowledge” seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the “incremental dualism” of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the “transcendental dualism” of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a deeper appreciation of Ancestor Religion as the oldest and most pervasive of all world religions. Keywords

Materiality and Spiritual Economies in Premodern Japanese Buddhism: A Problem in Historical Change

Abstract The recent emphasis on materiality in religion has encouraged a good deal of attention to materiality in Buddhism, but that attention has fallen entirely on Buddhist traditions with conventional monastic orientations. Yet the major Japanese Buddhist school known as True Pure Land Buddhism (Jōdo Shinshū) has also historically possessed a highly important, if different, material dimension, for which one touchpoint has been its merchant members called Ōmi shōnin who flourished in later premodern Japanese history. After alluding to the difficulty of isolating the ‘material’ in any religious culture, the article sketches the transition in Christian materialities in Europe which marked a cognitive shift from medieval modes of thinking (exteriorized, animistic-monistic, oriented to relics and ancestor religion) towards modern modes (interiorized, oriented to abstraction and the psychological individual). Against that paradigm, almost all premodern Buddhist materialities, including those in Japan, can be seen as medieval in nature. However, Jōdo Shinshū was a departure employing an innovatively interiorized doctrine. From that perspective, both Europe and Japan were highly complex civilizations displaying a long-term medieval-to-modern shift, which impacted the material manifestations of religions by gradually replacing older economies of ritual exchange with more modern-looking economies of preaching, religious publication and commercial life. Western scholarship has resisted appreciating these issues in an Asian setting.

Photography and the Religious Encounter: Ambiguity and Aesthetics in Missionary Representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo

William F. P. Burton's career straddled several worlds that seemed at odds with each other. As a first-generation Pentecostal he pioneered, with James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) at Mwanza, Belgian Congo in 1915. The CEM became a paradigm for future Pentecostal Faith Mission work in Africa, thanks to Burton's propagandist writings that were published in at least thirty European and North American missionary periodicals. His extensive publications, some twenty-eight books, excluding tracts and articles in mission journals, reveal that the CEM was a missionary movement animated by a relentless proselytism, divine healing, exorcism, and the destruction of so-called “fetishes.” The CEM's Christocentric message required the new believer to make a public confession of sin and reject practices relating to ancestor religion, possession cults, divination, and witchcraft. It was a deeply iconoclastic form of Protestantism that maintained a strong distinction between an “advanced” Christian religion, mediated by the Bible, and an idolatrous primitive pagan religion. Burton's Pentecostalism had many of its own primitive urges, harkening back to an age where miraculous signs and wonders were the stuff of daily life, dreams and visions constituted normative authority, and the Bible was immune to higher criticism. But his vision also embraced social modernization and he preached the virtues of schooling and western styles of clothing, architecture, and agriculture. It was this combination of primitive and pragmatic tendencies that shaped the CEM's tense relations with the Belgian colonial state.

Symbol and authority in Mpondo ancestor religion

(1983). Symbol and authority in Mpondo ancestor religion. African Studies: Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 113-133.

Symbol and authority in Mpondo ancestor religion

Symbol and authority in Mpondo ancestor religion

The appearance of “ancestor religion” in modern Japan: The years of transition from the Meiji to the Taishō periods

The appearance of “ancestor religion” in modern Japan: The years of transition from the Meiji to the Taishō periods