Beyond the Primitive: The Religions of Nonliterate Peoples

by Sam D. Gill

Paperback

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Native American religions were the focus of his work for twenty-five years. He regularly hung out in cultures in the American Southwest—Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Zuni—to observe ritual and dancing. Since the early 1990s Sam has been an enthusiastic student of dancing in cultures around the world including travel to observe and study dancing to Bali and Java, Thailand and Nepal, Ghana and Mali, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Sam has taught courses on many topics related to dancing notably a yearlong course “Religion and Dance” that covered over thirty dance traditions and included weekly dance studios taught by artists from the relevant cultures. In the late 1990s Sam founded, with his daughter Jenny, a dance and music school, Bantaba World Dance & Music. For many years he has taught salsa dance in high schools, in his classes at CU, and in the community including a performance group. He has developed an extensive catalog of salsa dance instructional videos. Sam’s insatiable interest in various fields of study—movement, dancing, play, masking, perception and the senses, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, gender issues, fitness, gesture, aging—interweave and shape his current work. Since retiring from teaching in 2017 he has published at least a book a year including an Award Winning book "The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith" and most recently "Religion: A Contemporary Perspective."