ABSTRACT
Religion cannot be understood apart from society in Karamoja, which is not to say that one can be reduced to the other. However, traditional Karamojong religion is to a great extent implicit in society. Persons are seldom any more mature in religious terms than they are in social status, though this can happen. There is no corpus of doctrine to be taught and no conversion required from unbelief to belief. Members of the community are enculturated very gradually and slowly into the full inheritance of their culture, and this may take the by-path of personal and circumstantial differences, just as they are socialized into the community. Thus rites of passage are extraordinarily important both socially and ritually (Cox 1998b), as their very continuance through historical change suggests. Thus it is necessary to delineate here some of the basic aspects of the culture in order to locate religion aright.
