mportance that Australian aboriginal religion assigns to totems, ritual observances, and specific locations. Blood is an especially potent totem. It is conceptualized as the heritage of heroic human experience and the continuity of the community. Ritual dances and such rites of passage as circumcision, meanwhile, are meant to "bring social life and moral order into line with the mythically recounted patterns of the cosmos established in the Dream Time" (Nielsen, et al. 27).
The religions of the Native American Peoples of North America--Nielsen, et al. identify eighty-seven distinct groups--are as varied as the geography that surrounds them. Citing the often ill-informed Euro-American ethnocentric reductionist ideas about the religions of the indigenous peoples on the part of nonnative observers of these groups, Nielsen, et al. make the point that it is dangerous to overgeneralize about their religions, not least because their practices in the modern period appear to reflect the impact of contact with the European immigrant populations. However, their a
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