Indigenous new religious movements or cultic developments have a certain exotic appeal for theorists from state societies. But new religious developments in kin-based societies are not dissimilar in role to new political movements in state societies. For kin-based peoples, the ancestral realm is the source of life, knowledge, and power. During the original cosmogonic journeys, ancestral substances and energies were transformed into landforms and water sources. At the end of their journey the ancestors grew tired and merged into the landscape, taking the forms of hills, rocks, and trees. For their human descendants, following the ancestral way ensures protection from unknown and potentially malign outside forces. Breaking ancestral laws can lead to withdrawal of protection, revenge, and calamity. Indigenous people acted on the world and achieved their political and economic goals through religious ritual and activation of ancestral power.

The Western mind compartmentalizes human-world...