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 dominance, economic exploitation and marginalisation, the vision of leaving it behind was faced with horror. This paper shows that religious studies can comfortably abandon the discourse of religion and belief altogether by focusing on world-making practices unleashed during the processes of handling uncertainties and the lack of control in humans. This way, the discipline (1) elaborates on its old tradition of functionally oriented research, (2) fulfils an ambition to be truly decolonial, and (3) realises the 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. Furthermore, it becomes relevant to the core challenges of the Anthropocene.

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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).