I'm sorry I missed your edit. I've been going through the link you added, reading a bit here and there. The excerpt about "Crazy Dogs" was pretty interesting.

same thing with chinese and japanese beliefs, but they call those "philosophies" or "folk traditions," which is hardly better

only indo-europeans and semites are allowed to use the word religion

I'm sure you're well aware, but this is a criticism/complaint that gets brought up a lot, and not just in regards to religion. For example, for a while the word "primitive" has been used a describer of both indigenous religions and art and it's been pretty much decided that the term does the cultures that embrace them a disservice, because the term is seen as ethno-centric and implies the art or concepts as "lesser than." At least when I was in college, I don't know about now, the appropriate term was "indigenous" as it was seen as more accurate and "folk" has a bit of a different connotation. Though I sometimes wonder if the word "indigenous" has its own flaws and we should just get rid of qualifiers like that altogether. But then I think it'd be harder to describe what we're looking at if we're afraid to use qualifiers. So I dunno. I'm torn.

Anyhow, I think one of the hang ups people had for a long time, was that the definition "religion" was looked at in western expectations. If a belief system ticked the boxes of being structured, having a long and/or strong written history, and a significant number of adherents, it was given more weight. I'm under the impression that over the past century or so, academics and scholars are aiming to be less rigid in the definition and therefore becoming more inclusive.