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Religion has been an integral aspect of human life and metaphysical thought and a quest for the numinous has characterized Homo Sapiens, ever since the dawn of the human species. Religious beliefs and rituals exist at every level of human society. Even is those societies which have rudimentary technology, the metaphysical and philosophical systems are highly developed and complex, putting the question as to whether technology is the only standard for judging human intellectual capapacity. The so called tribal societies are characterized by elaborate systems of rituals and symbolic structures leading to an impression of their being exotic, among the lay public. However, systematic study of religion and analysis of rituals, symbols and myths and belief systems among the pre-literature people and the indigenous population of the world has yielded and enormous corpus of literature, theoretical insights and rich ethnography, which makes for an insght into the entire system of human thought processes and rationality as also provides a clue to the functioning of society. The anthropologist`s approach to the study of religion has largely focussed upon the study of those religious systems that are distinguished from the Universalitic or world religions by being the specific world-views, belief systems of indidvidual communities. These are named ojly after the name of the commuity to which they belong and specific and localized. This is not to say, common institutions and symbolic cconstructs do not exist across various religions of the world. In fact there are many institutions of common occurance like, cycle rituals, taboos, religious functionaries and so on such that every where there is a ritual way of incorporation a new born into society, some taboos related to pregnancy, some myths regarding origin of the human race and many similarities in world view and belief patterns. But the study of the tribal religions is usually an aspect of the individual ethnographic studies undertaken by the the anthropologists. As such these studies provide a glimpse of little known or specific practices and belief systems and enable us to build a comparative study of religions over a wide canvass, both spatially and temporally. The encyclopaedia of tribal religions, in twelve volume, is a glimpse into the enormous literature built up by anthropologists on the subject of religion, right from the earliest stage of the discipline to the present times. From an early evolutionary approach into the origin and development of religon, to the later functional, structural and symbolic studies, this encyclopaedia has attempted to include most of the major contributions to the study of religion of tribal societies. It includes classic works such as that of Tylor, rivers, lowie, malinowski, radciff-brown and Evans-Pritchard later writers like turner, firth and also those of more contemporary writers like richard schechner, michael taussing etc. the typology of division of the volumes if the most widely used in graduate and postgraduate studies of anthropology. 22 14 cm. ISBN 81-7755-038-1.cloth bound, jacket, boxed, figure tables, references, footnotes, figure tables. Covers all important tradiional and emerging subject areas like : elements of tribal religion; health and the supernatural; oracles; omens and dreams; shamans; magnicians and priests; religion and economy , rituyals and society, myths and world-view; witchcraft and magic; life and death in tribal socety; symbolism; life cycle rituals; and christianity and tribal religion, 12 volumes.
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