Religious and Ritual Practice

Documented religious and ritual practices studied ethnographically: ancestor veneration, divination, ritual sacrifice, shamanism as a practice of ritual specialists mediating the spirit world, totemism, the symbolic association of a kin group with an animal or natural object, and the cargo cult, a documented modern ritual movement anticipating the arrival of goods through ritual means. Belongs here: a documented practice whose primary content is religious belief, ritual specialism or symbolic cosmology. Does not belong here: the doctrinal or theological content of an organized religious tradition, which belongs to Divinity per this atlas's own scope charter seam; this subcategory covers the documented ethnographic practice, not the tradition's own doctrine.