How to decolonise religious studies by studying human handling of uncertainty

What is it about?

While critical scholarship has been showing for decades how the discourse of religion perpetuates and normalises colonial power relations, economic exploitation and marginalisation, as well as inconsistency and arbitrariness in analytical usage, the vision of leaving it behind was faced with horror. As if religious studies wouldn’t be possible otherwise. This paper shows that religious studies can comfortably leave the concepts of religion and belief behind in favour of focusing on world-making practices unleashed during the processes of handling uncertainties and the lack of control over the course of action. The text further shows that this way, the discipline (1) elaborates on its old tradition of functionally oriented research, (2) fulfills an ambition to be truly decolonial, and (3) becomes truthful to the original idea that, as a field, it is no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such. The last point is realised by connecting the discipline through the focus on the intersection of uncertainties and world-making practices to the very key issues of the Anthropocene.

Featured Image

Photo by Hassan Kibwana on Unsplash

Photo by Hassan Kibwana on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This way of practising the discipline of religious studies enables it to dispense with the foundational concepts of "religion" and "belief". Since these concepts are inherently colonising and hegemonic, and make the discipline complicit in capitalist colonial extractivism and in systematic devaluation of non-extractivist life-ways, dispensing with them and devising analytical tools that enable non-hegemonic, respectful analysis of human ways of world-making and good-life living is essential for our (humanity's) chance to tackle with dignity the challenges of the era in which humans have become a dominant geological force (or Anthropocene).