Ethnicity and paganism in the 21st century
LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Globalizacija; Etniškumas; Pagonybė; Etninės religijos; Etnosas; Visuomenė; Globalization; Ethnicity; Paganism; Ethnic religions; Ethnos; Society.
ENThe link between ethnicity and culture establishes itself during the period of human evolution in which spiritual practice was understood in what today we would label as a pagan orientation. The ethnos of people, tribe and/or community was directly connected to the natural environment and how this last variously threatened and supported human existence. There was not yet a degree of insulation and protection from the vagaries of nature that industrial civilisation has produced in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nor was there yet the proliferation of institutional differentiation that characterises the social complexity of today. In the origins of ethnos and culture, the community was essentially homogenised and unified in its protective stance against both natural and human foe. Unlike the increasingly cosmopolitan world of current times in which a plurality of ethnicities and religions live together in intermingled existence, ethnos and people were essentially a unity [3]. [Extract, p. 272]
