BY
Dr. Etim E.Okon
Associate Professor
Department of Religious and Cultural Studies,
University of Calabar
Cross River State, Nigeria
dretimokon55@gmail.com
+2348038025231
ABSTRACT
Early European explorers and administrators, who conducted ethnographic study of societies and cultures around the world, reported that the so–called “savage peoples” had little or no religion. Evans-Pritchard has identified the reason for such attitude “if the early traveler found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions”. (1954). Evans-Pritchard noted that early European explorers were Christians, and that it was left for anthropologists who were not Christians to extend the definition of religion to cover ancestral cults, totemic observances, fetishism, magic and witchcraft to encapsulate the religious orientation of people in non – western societies.
KEYWORDS: Religion, Primitive Culture, Africa, European Explorers, Christianity
RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE CULTURES AND SOCIETIES
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