Culture Groups

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A culture group entry records a people, an ethnic community or a linguistic community that the atlas ties its religious material to, grouped by shared language, shared colonial or migratory history, or the community's own self identification, rather than by any single religion its members practice, since one people can hold several traditions at once and a single tradition can span several peoples. Where an entry states a group's language or language family, it follows Ethnologue, the standard reference catalog of the world's living languages, for that specific linguistic classification rather than an informal or dated ethnic label.

An entry links outward to the traditions, deities, practices and sacred sites the atlas associates with that people, and records the documented historical circumstance, migration, colonization or geographic settlement, that the atlas's account of the connection actually rests on, rather than treating the people and their religion as a single fixed unit.

Where a culture group's own religious life includes practice, knowledge or ceremony reserved to its own members or initiates, an entry states plainly that such material exists and is closed, and describes the group's documented history and public religious life from outside that reserved material rather than setting it out.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edward Burnett Tylor's 1871 Primitive Culture, and specifically its second volume on religion, is the founding text of the academic study that first proposed comparing religious belief systematically across the world's peoples, arguing that animism, a belief in spiritual beings, was the earliest stage from which polytheism and eventually monotheism developed. That evolutionary sequence, ranking one people's religion as more developed than another's, has since been abandoned by anthropology as a whole, though the word animism and Tylor's basic comparative method, treating a people's religious life as a subject worth documenting in its own right, both remained in use long after the ranking itself was rejected.

Later ethnography replaced Tylor's evolutionary ladder with sustained fieldwork among a specific people, documenting a group's own beliefs, practices and self understanding in its own terms rather than placing it on a scale toward some other tradition's account of religious maturity, and a culture group entry follows that later standard rather than Tylor's original ranking.

An entry therefore records a people's documented religious life and its own self identification honestly, citing Tylor's own foundational text for the discipline's origin where relevant, while keeping his specific evolutionary claims named as a historical position anthropology has since set aside, not as a live scholarly account of how any people's religion actually developed.