Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
72. How are Indigenous narratives and oral traditions like “texts?”
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Dennis Kelley [+]
University of Missouri, Columbia
Dennis Kelley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research area is the intersection between religious, ethnic, and national identities, specifically in how they are negotiated and maintained through embodied practice in contemporary American Indian communities.
Description
In the analysis of human cultural production, any collection of symbolically meaningful things can be read as a “text.” But if we are confining the discussion to the stories associated with the deepest meanings of a social system, then both written and oral narratives fulfill the role of “religious” or “sacred” texts. In fact, many of the world’s religions began and continue traditions of oral transmission of stories, so in that way, indigenous narratives are very much like the religious texts we study.