page_title: Religion
section_title: Indigenous and folk
hierarchical_section_title: Religion / Specific religions / Indigenous and folk
caption_attribution_description: English: Chickasaw tribal dancers demonstrate a traditional "stomp" dance at the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma, United States. The women wear leggings made of turtle shells or other hollow containers filled with river rocks that rattle to the beat when they dance.
context_page_description: Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
  Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith, a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that aim mostly to give a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the origin of life, the universe, and other things.
context_section_description: Indigenous religions or folk religions refers to a broad category of traditional religions that can be characterised by shamanism, animism and ancestor worship, where traditional means "indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…". These are religions that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe; they often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Some faiths are syncretic, fusing diverse religious beliefs and practices.
  Australian Aboriginal religions.
  Folk religions of the Americas: Native American religions
  Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g. in China.
caption: Chickasaw Native cultural/religious dancing
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