At 12:56 AM 1/6/01 +0000, you wrote:
>Orisha is a tradition of the Yoruba peoples of neighboring Nigeria. The
>religions are similar in that they worship spirits and practice a shamanistic
>type of healing, but the structure of the religious systems is different.
>There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different religions practiced
>throughout black Africa, but it has become common to name them all Voodoo or
>more recently, Orisha.
I don't know about now, but in the 1980's when I was teaching in the
religious studies depts of Obafemi Awolowo University and the University of
Benin (both in Nigeria), Nigerian academics considered it racist to call
the traditional religions anything other than African Traditional Religions
(ATR). Loni Bramson
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