Functionalist intuitions, uncertainty, and ontological politics: Religious studies for the Anthropocene
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | From the postcolonial perspective, the category of religion intertwined with the binary of rational/irrational has served the modern West to legitimise its treatment of Others as inferiors. At the same time, it made the West systematically misrecognise contingencies, contradictions and unanticipated consequences in its ways of making and inhabiting the world. With the ontological turn in anthropology (Latour 1993, Holbraad - Pedersen 2017), the hegemony of modern Western ontologies that transform non-modern world-makings into sets of politically irrelevant “cultural beliefs,” is not sustainable any more if the attempts to solve climate, economic and geopolitical challenges of the Anthropocene should not end in global destruction accompanied by yet another greenwashed exploitation and green colonialism. The power inscribed within modern ontological hegemony thus strikes back and calls also for a radical revision of the study of religions. In my presentation, I’ll reexamine classical intuitions concerning the productive significance of uncertainty for religion and magic that were elaborated within the functionalist currents of religious studies. I’ll show how these intuitions–if turned properly inside out–, may enable religious studies to leave “religion” and “beliefs” behind and become a relevant discipline within the framework of ontological politics in the Anthropocene as the sort of uncertainty studies. |
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