Decolonizing Knowledges, Undisciplining Religion

Abstract

The article engages in the undisciplining of the study of religion and proposes two central concepts/approaches for how to do so: the pluriverse and materiality. But what is undisciplining? And is it needed? To frame the undisciplining of the study of religion and render visible how I conceive of it as a needed practice, the article discusses the relationship between knowledge, materiality, power, and transformation. This relationship is concretized by prioritizing critical decolonial perspectives from the South African context. Here, I center materiality and the material effects of colonial discourse and epistemology as critical entry points. I also highlight the importance of embodied approaches to knowledge, illustrated through decolonial feminist engagements with post-qualitative methodologies. Informed by these critical insights, I unpack the concept of the pluriverse and highlight its epistemic and methodological relevance for the undisciplining of the study of religion. (Re-)turning to materiality, I foreground materiality as a creative and critical knowledge framework and argue for the varying ways it may function for rethinking and undisciplining the study of religion.

1. Introduction

This article is primarily about the undisciplining of the study of religion and proposes two central concepts for how to do so: the pluriverse and materiality. Simultaneously, the article is about the relationship between knowledge and materiality, power, and transformation. To be able to do the much-needed work of undisciplining the study of religion, I prioritize a few critical decolonial perspectives emerging from the South African context. As such, I begin by examining the subject of knowledge to foreground some of the central contested terrains, epistemically, methodologically, and conceptually, that inform my approach when engaging in the undisciplining of the study of religion.

The article is divided into three major sections. In the first section, I emphasize materiality as a critical entry point for contesting knowledge. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of autohistoria-teoría,1 a self-reflexive and decolonial writing practice that intentionally challenges conventional academic writing and style by drawing on personal narratives and experiences as the starting point of theorizing, I begin the section with a vignette. The vignette introduces reflections, memories and experiences of being a student at the University of Cape Town more than twenty years ago. It is meant to draw attention to the ambiguous materiality of a knowledge-making space and, as such, illustrates the material effects of colonial discourse and epistemology. The vignette continues into the present, where I reflect on decolonial moments and material transformations, which hold different epistemological starting points from which to theorize. In this way, the vignette is used as an opening to connect knowledge and materiality while also identifying the act of decolonizing as a material discourse with consequences for how we (and I) think about and come to knowledge.

‘Who is the knower?’ and ‘What view from nowhere?’ are central questions that I critically explore in the second section of this article. Theorizing from the experiential and material insights the vignette illuminates, I foreground embodied approaches to knowledge. In responding to the epistemicides of the past (which continue into the present), I suggest we can learn a lot about undisciplining our thinking (also in the study of religion) by looking to decolonial feminist work. I offer reflections on post-qualitative methodologies, that is, methodologies that creatively center more-than-human entanglements to illustrate knowledge-making endeavors that challenge human exceptionalism, resist universalizing and extractivist knowledge production, and, rather, attempt to contribute to knowledge that foregrounds relationality, species and things beyond the human.

In the third section of this article, I engage in the undisciplining of the study of religion. I do this by first offering some insights concerning ‘the discipline’ and disciplinary logic/boundaries and offering concrete examples of how to engage in undisciplining the central task of defining religion. Connectedly, I introduce and examine the notion of the pluriverse and its conceptual, epistemic, and methodological relevance for the field of religion. Foregrounding the pluriverse as a meaningful and usable undisciplining approach and materiality, I (re)turn to materiality. Introducing the material turn in the study of religion as a growing body of knowledge that takes seriously not only materiality but also modes of connection, I discuss some of the trends and blind spots. Noting the critique, I make a case for why materiality and the material turn in religion may function as a creative and critical knowledge framework for undisciplining the study of religion.

Finally, I end the article with reflections on the materiality of colonial discharge and compostables for the pluriverse in the study of religion. Anzaldúa’s autohistoria-teoría, which invites us to consider the ways our experiences inform the knowledge we produce and the materiality/material effects of those knowledges, is incisive in this regard. To chart out new directions for the field of the study of religion, using pluriversality and materiality as central undisciplining tools, I draw on feminist creative engagement with compost to enable new modes of knowability and sensible recycling.

2. On Entering Decolonizing: Materiality Matters

The resounding call to decolonize echoes throughout the planetary surface of the Earth, journeying alongside and through the unstable borders of geographical divisions, the fault lines of colonial historiographies. Perhaps (still) not as loud at the university I now call home, the University of Oslo, the call has been carried out vociferously at my formative academic home, the University of Cape Town. Being temporarily re-situated at my alma mater, I reminisce over a decade-long relationality that fundamentally shaped and inspired my academic motivations and aspirations. I recall hanging out with friends and colleagues on the ‘Jamie steps’ (short for Jameson stairs that lead up to the towering Jameson Memorial Hall),2 overlooking the statue of a seated (and, possibly, thinking!) Cecil John Rhodes who looks over the area commonly known as the Cape Flats.3 I remember feeling quite at ease in the space at the time. Being a young white student from overseas, the colonial materiality of the space escaped me. I remained unaffected and was unaware of my unmarked privilege. Many years later, I recall walking across the stage in (then) Jameson Memorial Hall in my red robe and quasi-Victorian black velvet hat on the day of my PhD graduation. I remember being in doubt about wearing the hat, it made me feel uneasy. Not in the sense ‘I look silly’ or ‘it doesn’t go with my outfit’ (it did!). Rather, the hat emerged as a powerful symbol of the materiality of campus coloniality. I had changed. I wore my whiteness critically.

I recall kneeling down on a stool, cushioned in worn blue velvet fabric, in front of the Vice Chancellor, being “capped”, and the ensuing embodied re-erection to the soundscape of clapping hands and ululation. The latter of which, on one level, seemed utterly out of place given the colonial overtones of the ritualization experienced, yet, on another level, completely in place: a disruption of the ‘serious parody’, a rupture in the performative script, and perhaps most of all, a reverberation that notably celebrates change and transformation.4

Much has changed. Much is still in the process of change and transformation. A critical decolonizing moment was the Rhodes Must Fall protests that gained momentum in 2015.5 Primarily driven by students, Rhodes did fall. In fact, he fell rather quickly in the end.6 The protests spread throughout the university landscape in South Africa and received extensive international attention that caused decolonizing ripple effects elsewhere, particularly at academic institutions in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Students called out to decolonize the university, decolonize campuses, decolonize curricula, decolonize classrooms and lecture theatres, using decolonizing methodologies and pedagogies. Notable academics followed suit, among them Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand, WITS). Well-known for his provocative and astute contributions to decolonial thinking and theorization, Mbembe incisively notes, partly in response to the critics who are concerned about the erasure of history that the decolonizing-turn might lead to, that “[h]istory is not the same thing as memory. Memory is the way in which we put history to rest, especially histories of suffering, trauma and victimization” (Mbembe 2016, p. 30). Following Mbembe, I have become exceedingly conscious about the entanglements of materiality and knowledges (both the embodied and the purportedly dis-embodied kind) that figure in projecting powerful discourses of belonging/non-belonging. Attention to location is central to doing the important work of positioning, yet, at the same time, location is (always) a space of (and for) contestation. One of my colleagues frequently and somewhat jokingly invokes ‘the farm’ as a more befitting name for the University of Cape Town, connecting its location to the Rustenberg farm, which in the 17th and 18th centuries housed slave plantations and connectedly, also burial grounds. Such a history is drawn attention to by, amongst other things, renaming Jameson Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall in 2018. Sarah Baartman, the Khoi-woman who was taken on board the British ship Diadem and transported to London, only to be exhibited—first alive, and then, after her death, Musée de l’Homme in Paris displayed her remains up until 1974. For European scientists at the time, Sarah Baartman represented the missing link between humans and apes, and some argue that scientists’ brutal treatment of Baartman’s body was the beginning of what later became known as the field of eugenics.7

Sarah Baartman was finally returned to South Africa in 2002, reunited with Khoisan land and the living dead. When I look up at the Great Hall today, the Sarah Baartman Hall, I think of the ways in which materialities not only commemorate, memorialize, and restore, materialities also bespeak the relationship between knowledge and transformation. From her position, resting against the ‘Mountain rising out the Sea’ (Huri ǂOaxa), the land which the Khoi and San once called home, Sarah Baartman does not have to look out at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Sarah Baartman watches over the burial grounds. She is now rooted at the heart of the university, partaking in its rebirth; she ‘put[s] history to rest’.

I am foregrounding these insights and important decolonizing moments from the South African context, not only as they bring to bear on my positioning and formative academic background but also as they represent critical openings for decolonial thinking and practices elsewhere, which I believe is precisely the kind of undisciplining work this special issue of Religions calls for. Using Anzaldúa’s theory of autohistoria-teoría helps to render visible the deep connections between materiality and knowledge. It assists in the undisciplining of knowledge (and indeed knowledge about religion) as something detached from materiality and experience. The openings for decolonial thinking and practice in the study of religion and further afield start with acknowledging and noticing the material effects of colonial discourse and epistemology. In this way, as the materiality of coloniality transforms, new epistemic realities from which to theorize surface.

Undisciplining work, or the work of undisciplining, is read here and partly inspired by Mbembe’s identification of the two sides of the decolonizing project (Mbembe 2016): (1) decolonizing the university as a critical orientation and intervention toward destabilizing entrenched colonial and Eurocentric knowledge regimes and disciplinary divisions and (2) reimagining/remaking knowledges in and through the interstices of such divisions. As the examples above show, concerning the decolonial remaking of the materiality of the UCT campus, buildings, university avenues, parks, statues, and benches are not innocent, not neutral; rather, such materialities speak, sometimes loudly. In this way, different materialities can act as reminders, particularly reminding those who do not belong. For others, those in positions of unmarked privilege continue to move through institutional spaces with ease, rarely noticing its suffocating renditions. Mbembe incisively illuminates such ambiguity when reflecting on the relationship between the “intellectual life” of the university and the buildings in which such life is housed. He notes, “Apartheid architecture—which prevails in most of our higher learning institutions [in South Africa]—is not conducive to breathing” (Mbembe 2016, p. 30). The work of undisciplining, then, does not only involve practicing increased awareness and critique of the Eurocentric knowledge regimes that have informed the genealogies of our universities and disciplines, and, in this sense, undisciplining the ways in which we engage in knowledge-making practices by for instance developing and partaking in the decolonizing of curricula, of pedagogy, of methodology—although this too is important. The work of undisciplining also involves recognizing the continuation of epistemic violence, as it is conveyed and memorialized in and through the architectural landscapes we traverse, the artifacts we are surrounded by, the university avenues we stroll, and the benches we sit on. Materiality matters in the decolonizing of knowledge-making in the undisciplining of the study of religion. We must be able to breathe!

3. On the Subject of Knowledge-Making

“Coloniality of knowledge must be met with decoloniality of thinking and knowing.”

(Steyn and Mpofu 2021, p. 14)

In the anthology Decolonising the Human: Reflections from Africa on Difference and Oppression (Steyn and Mpofu 2021), Melissa Steyn and William Mpofu offer a poignant introductory chapter that problematizes the dominant subject of knowledge, that is, the unmarked Knower, the legitimate producer of rational and scientific knowledge.8 Not only was (and still is) the privileged positioning of the Knower dependent on the vilification of its Other (scientifically and religiously) in order to maintain and sustain His position. The production of hegemonic knowledge regimes also caused, however complicitously or intentionally, epistemicides. That is the obliteration of indigenous ways of knowing (e.g., through cosmologies, mythologies, histories, and languages) (Steyn and Mpofu 2021, p. 11; on epistemicides, see also Grosfoguel 2013). Hence, while decentering the Knower, the colonial Subject of knowledge production is central to the work of decolonizing and, indeed, undisciplining the ways in which we approach, do, and come to knowledge, the restorative work of retrieving, reconceiving, and reclaiming dismembered and mutilated indigenous knowledges is equally critical for the decolonial work of reimagining and remaking knowledges for “the university of tomorrow” (Mbembe 2016, p. 37). The Sarah Baartman Hall at the center of the University of Cape Town campus bespeaks such a remaking. Being a center of imperial knowledge, Jameson Hall memorialized the legacy of the Cape Colony and its epistemic knowledge regimes. The Sarah Baartman Hall, on the other hand, centers the marginalized. Epistemically, it reclaims Khoisan. Materially, it commemorates and brings to life ancestral land and people who were dismembered and enslaved. Today, when graduands celebrate their academic achievements when their knowledge becomes acknowledged and formalized, the materiality wherein which they are situated retrieves and directs attention to a decolonial epistemology that may inform ‘the university of tomorrow’.

One of the many critical contributions of indigenous, feminist, and decolonial work has been to destabilize the notion of knowledge as disembodied and, connectedly, the view from nowhere, often taken to represent neutral and universal knowledges or truths. Through the ceaseless labor of rendering visible and troubling the ‘coloniality of power’, the ‘coloniality of knowledge’, and the ‘coloniality of Being’ (Quijano 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Wynter 2003), the mirage of innocent, ahistorical, apolitical and objective knowledge production unfolds and crumbles. To be sure, the struggle continues, and as Maldonado-Torres aptly put it, “coloniality survives colonialism […] as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 243). I do not need to look any further than the first reading book my son, who is in Grade 1 at a racially diverse public school in Cape Town, proudly brought home. The book “Kathy and Mark”, which is studiously rehearsed by Grade 1 learners, is, at best, visually, an embarrassing reproduction of South African whiteness. The book was first published in 1970—that is, under the apartheid regime (my son’s edition is from 1997). What is this 54-year-old book doing on the curriculum? I am reminded of Sara Ahmed’s astute discussion in her article “A phenomenology of whiteness” on the ways in which “whiteness holds its place” through the normalization and domination of “whiteness as a habit, as second nature” (Ahmed 2007, p. 156). Indeed, the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ permeates our every day in our search for knowledge and in our efforts to decolonize and remake knowledges. It seeps through institutional bodies, pierces our textbooks, and is transposed onto learners-in-the-making. Indeed, breathe, we must! Albeit less toxicity perforating our bodies is much desired.

Fortunately, there are decolonial knowledge collectives that are invested in the work of breathing, invested in the development and in the remaking of knowledges that meet the respiratory demands of the body. Recent (often feminist) decolonial work shows us that an increased awareness of the colonial ‘logic’ of knowledge production (its methodologies and practices) is necessary not only for directing critique and, in that way, challenging normative assumptions about the production (and Subject) of knowledge itself, but also for creatively exploring the possibilities and openings for knowledge transformation. In a recent special issue of Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), the editors, Nike Romano, Vivienne Bozalek, and Tamara Shefer, welcomed contributions that are “Thinking with ocean/s for reconceptualising scholarship in higher education” (Romano et al. 2023). Perhaps it is precisely in the interstices—the space between the disciplines that separate us—that new knowledge flows and circulations are conceived and birthed. Perhaps it is in the cracks and crevices of the colonial disciplinary logic that separated humans from nature (the making of the humanities and the natural sciences) that imaginings and the doing of new knowledge-making practices unfold. With this special issue, Romano, based at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Bozalek and Shefer, both based at the University of the Western Cape, invite us into knowledge-making practices that take seriously embodiment, affect, and more-than-human beings/materialities. They invite us to consider the various ways in which ‘slow scholarship’ (Bozalek 2021),9 ‘wild pedagogies’ and ‘wild thinking’ (Jickling et al. 2018; Halberstam 2020),10 ‘mobile and relational methodologies’ (Springgay and Truman 2018; Wong 2013)11 and ‘watery methodologies’ (Ingersoll 2016; Neimanis 2017; Shefer and Bozalek 2022)12 offer remedial alternatives to the extractivist logic and methodologies of colonial knowledge production. The special issue includes critically insightful and creative articles that, amongst other things, challenge the construct of disembodied knowledge by meditating an “octo-aesthetics” as a figurative opening to rethink pedagogies as care practices (including more-than-human care) engendering learning/thinking/being otherwise (Carstens 2023); meandering as an expression of ‘slow scholarship’ along the hydrological cycle provides generative openings for more collaborative and inclusive teaching and learning practices (Martin et al. 2023); and, how performativity (here, the South African collective Empatheater), expressed through indigenous storytelling and material aesthetics contributes to developing affective pedagogies and self-reflexive teaching practices (Wiese 2023). To be sure, not only does this genre of scholarly creative work do much to debunk universalism and the view from nowhere, but it also innovatively and importantly undoes and decentres the knowing human Subject by taking seriously the ‘coming into being’ of knowledge with more-than-human materialities and relationalities. It also calls us to experiment, to be inventive, curious, and creative in our knowledge-making endeavors, and to be inclusive (and I mean this in the broadest way possible) in the fashioning of new methodologies. The post-qualitative methodological centering of performative aesthetics, arts and crafts in the development and making of knowledges, in memory work, and in crafting reflexive and inclusive teaching practices do much to situate the potentiality for convivial knowledge-making collectives (as opposed to individualized methodologies and knowledge regimes) and bring to bear on the entangled work of working with more-than-human entities as central figurations and materialities in knowledge-making activities (Segalo 2023, 2016; Pérez-Bustos and Bello-Tocancipá 2023; Hoel 2023).

Highlighting relationalities between knowledge and transformation and approaching the much-needed work of undisciplining religion through the prism of decolonizing, in the first two sections of this article, I have journeyed through what I consider some of the central contested terrains, epistemically, methodologically, and conceptually. I have emphasized materiality as a critical entry point as materiality informs how we might conceive of the study of religion beyond the human while also being attentive to the epistemologies materiality inscribes and expresses. In my view, then, the work of undisciplining the study of religion is inclusive of contesting knowledges—going against the grain of colonial histories and knowledge regimes and reimagining/restoring other ways of knowing/being—but not only. Undisciplining is also about the epistemological weight of material landscapes/artifacts—the proverbial graduation hat—and their location, and the varying ways in which they bespeak the relationship between knowledge and transformation and stimulate the emergence of different and varied institutional cultures, the intellectual and deeply embodied life of the university. Similarly, in the section on the Subject of knowledge, I highlighted the continuous ghosting of coloniality, the continued presence of the past, and thus, not only the need to destabilize Knower and His extractivist methodologies, but also to be cognizant of the vast remedial work that lies ahead. In fact, I argue that the work of undisciplining the study of religion also needs to respond to the epistemicides of the past (which continues into the present). I suggest, by offering reflections on recent decolonial feminist work, that it is perhaps precisely here, in the interstices between disciplines, in the experimentation of post-qualitative methodologies, by creatively drawing in and on more-than-human materialities and relationalities that we can restore, remake, and reimagine the work of being, doing and thinking Otherwise. It is through this panacea I frame the next section on the work of undisciplining the study of religion.

4. Undisciplining the Study of Religion: Disciplinarity, the Pluriverse and Materiality

“The discipline is the regulation of meaning, something which is contextual, but this regulation was and is still made in the ways that create absolutism, in the sense that the idea of the universal rests with the Euro-American empire. The discipline, hailing from this geographic and epistemic locus, is seen as knowledge, and knowledge is seen as discipline. What does not emerge, however, is subjectivity in its entirety—that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the margins of the Euro-American empire, an empire that assumes the positionality of the center for the purpose of universalism.”

(Sitole 2016, p. 107)

Reflecting on Sitole’s insights, we might begin by considering the discipline of the study of religion as regulated by what it aspired to be and what it was not. As the discipline developed during colonial times and through colonial encounters, the regulation of meaning was informed by the scientific ideals of the Enlightenment era. The discipline of the science of religion emerged along with its critical distance to theology (what it was not). Early on, debates about what religion is and what it is not followed colonial logic steeped in Christian norms and worldviews. Commonly, indigenous peoples were described as people without religion or people whose practices were characterized by superstition and the use of magic. Conceptualizations of religion tended to include hierarchies of religion and of religious people while also strongly advocating the ideal of progress. Oral cultures were commonly positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy (religiously inferior), whereas ‘religions and peoples of the book’ were perceived to be more religiously advanced. Simply put, all that was not Christian was comparatively less religion and less religious. However, even the most ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ of religions had the potential to progress towards more civilized and advanced forms of religion (that is, with the right colonial supervision). Conceptualizations of what religion is and what it is not and the establishment of hierarchies of religion along an axis of progress were intrinsic to regulating the discipline and for disciplinary meaning-making. In this way, the discipline centered a colonial Christianity as the universal norm. Not surprisingly, scholarly debates about what religion is and what it is not continue to be of importance to the discipline today. Although not so much rooted in understandings of religious hierarchies or the ideal of progress, contemporary debates around the boundaries of religion (where does religion end and culture begin? Can religion be fake? When is it authentic? What is real religion anyway?) tell us something about the discipline’s continued need to define what religion is or isn’t.13 I am not advocating for abandoning all definitions of religion. Rather, tracing the need for meaning-making of religion to its colonial inception, where disciplinary boundaries or regulation of what religion is or isn’t mattered to the colonial project, presents an opportune moment to do some undisciplining work. Working with defining religion together with students or presenting and discussing different definitions of religion is also an opportunity to speak about power, coloniality, and materiality. What do definitions do? What are their functions? Who or what is included/excluded? In such a way, we do not present definitions of religion—such as Daniel L. Pals 7–10 Theories of Religion—as innocent, neutral, or without history. Definitions are, by definition, powerful, and although some definitions of religion might seem ridiculous or outdated from our contemporary perspective, they come from somewhere, are articulated by someone, and are reflective of historical contexts and the power relations at work at the time of their articulation. In the case of definitions of religion, what religion is and what it is not went hand in hand with the colonial project of taking control over indigenous land. Dispossessing indigenous people of land, through, for example, the establishment of numerous missionary stations around the world or through the boarding school systems in the United States, Canada, as well as in the Nordics (headed by a wide variety of Christian denominations) relied on definitions of religion, particularly to separate the Christian center from the margin, the ‘civilized’ from the ‘savage’. In such a way, the relationship between what counts as valid knowledge (about religion) is also deeply intertwined with materiality. That is, the ways in which possession of land (as a material expression of coloniality) was connected to hierarchical meaning making about religion and religious people. Calling attention to the power of discipline through discussing definitions of religion in classrooms and lecture theatres, we can engage in acts of undisciplining together with our students, explore the decolonial potential that lies in such undertakings, while also put into practice ‘wild pedagogy’ which intends to destabilize boundedness and predictability. As such, I agree with Kathryn Lofton’s (2012) incisive point on the subject of religion when she writes that “Religion as a description of human behavior was created through colonialism and its governments, its sciences, and its theologies. To be trained as a scholar of religious studies is then to practice a postcolonial methodology of a profoundly colonial subject” (Lofton 2012, p. 384; my emphasis). Such a critical entry into the discipline of the study of religion does the work of foregrounding historical conditions and power relations, calling on religious studies scholars-in-the-making to be attentive and self-reflexive to matters of positioning, materiality and the politics of inclusion/exclusion and to draw on these insights when producing knowledge about religion.

Tendayi Sitole’s (2016) critical and insightful engagement with disciplinarity leads him to propose “ecologies of knowledges” as a decolonial and somewhat disobedient epistemic response to “the rationality of the cannons of conquerors and the preaching of missionaries” (Rodriguez; cited in Sitole 2016, p. 127).14 ‘Ecologies of knowledges’ is grounded in an acknowledgment of the world as constituted by many diverse and interconnected worlds. It projects an ontological shift that moves us from the idea of ‘world views’ to the presence of multidirectional worlds of knowing and being. Importantly, it responds to the history of epistemicides by centering the epistemologies of those marginalised by empire. As such, it echoes the notion of the pluriverse, a concept that I unpack epistemically and methodologically to argue for its relevance as an undisciplining tool for the study of religion.

The notion of the pluriverse, a conceptual reimagining of a world that can hold multiple/plural worlds, emerged from the very real indigenous, epistemological, and political struggles of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico (Mignolo 2018). Developed and further theorized by primarily South American decolonial scholars invested in the life of epistemological plurality (Mignolo 2000; Santos 2014, 2017), the pluriverse has traveled through geopolitical landscapes and knowledge regimes and been taken up by decolonial knowledge collectives elsewhere (e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi 2016). The concept of the pluriverse calls for the opening up of colonial, singular, and universalizing knowledges so as to make room for the situated and lived experiences of those marginalized by the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ and the materiality of colonialism.

One could perhaps argue that the study of religion is well-positioned in the academy to engage in knowledge-making that is responsive to the call of the pluriverse (see van Klinken 2020). After all, the study of religion as a social phenomenon, as the study of ‘worldviews’, cosmologies, mythologies, practices, and materialities, reveals the complex, diverse, and multifaceted ways of religion, the presence of a plurality of knowledges and epistemologies that not only bespeak the here and now—the this-worldly—but also take seriously the realness of multiple intersecting worlds of spirit beings, deities, ancestors, and worlds of the unseen and the unknown. Yet, as has been argued already, the formation of the discipline of religion was birthed through imperial conquest, colonial encounters, and exchanges and premised on reading and understanding the Other (and the Other’s religion or lack thereof) through the prism of a superior colonial Christianity (see also Nye 2019; Masuzawa 2005; King 1999). To be sure, I agree with the need to bring the coloniality of religion into view, not the least as an important decolonial move of undisciplining, I am, however, also invested in wrestling with the question amply phrased by David Chidester, “Can we be in the empire of religion but not of it?” (Chidester 2014, p. xviii). I am indebted to the knowledge collective of the Institute of Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA) at the University of Cape Town, where I worked for close to a decade under the directorship of Professor David Chidester, for attending to the dynamism of the circulation of knowledge about religion. Such a dynamism was central in a formative postgraduate class on the phenomenology of religion, convened by Prof. Chidester, where we read Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the AmaZulu (Callaway 1868–1970). To our surprise, we discovered that it was, in fact, Mpengula Mbande, Callaway’s primary indigenous informant, who authored the text! Importantly, the text reflects Mbande’s ambivalent navigation and mediation of colonial Christianity (being a recent convert) and Zulu religion, a position that informed his narration and projection of what constituted Zulu religion in The Religious System of the AmaZulu.15

As we continue to be critical about where knowledge comes from, how it travels, for whom it is produced, and for what purpose, Chidester’s situated contribution to the tracing of the production, authentication, and circulation of knowledge about religion becomes instructive. Employing the lens of “triple mediation”—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—Chidester (2014) dynamically mediates and complicates the impulse of binary thinking when approaching the subject of the coloniality of religion. I contend that such focussed attention to location may enable undisciplining work that, rather than eschewing the coloniality of religion and the epistemologies it contains wholesale, is attentive to the varied and multidirectional mediations (and epistemologies) at work in the production of knowledge about religion. Such an approach, I believe, is reflective of a pluriversal approach to the study of religion. In this sense, I employ the pluriverse as an epistemically relevant concept for the study of religion as it illustrates the coming together of diverse epistemologies in the production of knowledge about religion and, indeed, also in the production of the empire of religion. The pluriverse as an epistemological concept helps us to discover and listen to the presence of marginalized voices in the ‘empire of religion’. Undisciplining religion by foregrounding epistemic plurality is to follow the circulation of knowledge about religion and, in this way, resist the impulse of universalizing or dichotomous mechanisms of colonial logic.

Considering Mbembe’s (2016) call to reimagine/remake knowledges as critical for the project of decolonizing (the second side of the decolonizing project) and Chidester’s meditation on the possibility of not being ‘of empire’ and his connected invitation to “imagine creative possibilities for producing knowledge about religion” (2014), the work of undisciplining religion, I believe, calls us to task. van Klinken (2020) ponders such a potentiality of imagination in his engagement with the pluriverse. In his discussion, van Klinken draws our attention to the (somewhat ironic) tendency in the study of religion to devalue religious epistemologies in favor of secular, universal, and reductionist interpretive paradigms. The boundary work performed through the formation of the study of religion (or the science of religion), in contrast to that of theology, is haunting. Van Klinken suggests, using African religious traditions as an example, that the concept of the pluriverse enables an opening to the “alternative, often enchanted epistemologies and ontologies they [African religious traditions] represent” (van Klinken 2020, p. 150). The need to take seriously religious epistemologies in the study of religion (!) does not only bring the need to be responsive to colonial epistemicides and epistemic injustices to the fore, but it also foregrounds contemporary proclivities for the secular in the study of religion—the new universal by which religious phenomena are made meaningful. In this sense, using the pluriverse as an epistemic undisciplining tool asks us not only to acknowledge epistemic plurality but to move beyond the regulatory and limiting mechanisms of secular meaning-making. Such an undertaking can perhaps also move us beyond the human in the study of religion towards more-than-human methodologies. Retrieving religious and indigenous epistemologies in the study of religion, those unworlded by colonialism and subjected to secular meaning-making, may give us critical insight not only about knowledge about religion but also about the various ways this knowledge is and can be materialized and, as such, take account of the “material absences” in the study of religion (Meyer 2024).16

Drawing on the inventiveness, creativity, and curiosity-driven post-qualitative methodologies of the feminist decolonial knowledge collectives engaged with earlier in this article, undisciplining—not through the lens of critique—but through the lens of co-construction, creative re-imagination, epistemic multiplicity, and entanglements, seem like a worthwhile and potentially fruitful project. Methodologically, the pluriverse demands partiality. As theorized and developed by feminist scholars, also within the study of religion, partiality is reflective of the fact that speaking positions are always embodied and situated (Hoel 2019). Similarly, van Klinken (2020) argues that religious studies, broadly, still seem to be holding on to the (misplaced) ideals of neutrality and detachment to facilitate the production of objective knowledges. Employing the pluriverse methodologically in the study of religion would include paying increased attention to the ways in which embodiment affects and informs knowledge production. The experiential becomes a central dimension of knowledge about religion, particularly experiences that have been marginalized or silenced. Drawing inspiration from the post-qualitative methodologies outlined earlier, such a shift would direct attention away from extractivist data production and instead produce knowledge about religion that may help us reconceptualize the field of religion itself.

Another methodological aspect of using the pluriverse as an undisciplining tool is to re-focus attention toward more collective knowledge-making practices (simply put, developing diverse practices of working and coming to knowledge together as opposed to the ideal of the ‘sole’ researcher). In his article, van Klinken foregrounds participatory research, which involves a commitment to be responsive to the injustices we experience and observe. He suggests participatory action research as one such methodological response, where “our ethical and political commitments” inform the knowledge-making we partake in (van Klinken 2020, p. 152). Although careful not to expect or demand that we all become scholar-activists, van Klinken quotes Jacob Olupona’s observation that “African scholars today feel morally obligated to address religion as it relates to immediate and pressing human concerns, and as such, they serve as models for the entire academy” (Olupona; quoted in van Klinken 2020, p. 153). Cautious of recasting ‘African scholars’ as a coherent/uniform group of scholars dedicated to social transformation (indeed, many do not subscribe to this explicit moral imperative in their research), as a scholar of religion trained in the South African context, I recognize the commitment of engaging in scholarship that is responsive to social challenges and concerns, not the least in my own work on religion and gender and the knowledge collectives to which I belong. For van Klinken, it is the knowledge-making potential of international collaboration, participating in scholarship “in solidarity with the communities on the front lines of the social and political struggles of our times” that, as I read him, may work to decenter the privileging of Euro-American knowledge-traditions as the realm of theory-making (and valid knowledge) and the ‘epistemologies of the South’ (Santos 2014) as primarily data. Establishing a profound and unflinching commitment to what Chandra Talpade Mohanty foregrounds as “horizontal comradeship” (Mohanty 1991; drawing on Benedict Anderson’s use of the term in Imagined Communities, Anderson 1983), across geographies and temporalities of ecotone landscapes, we engage in the undisciplining of religion. Working within the framework of the pluriverse, we breathe and birth epistemologies that may radically dethrone the coloniality of religion and instead, make space for, in our methodologies, our pedagogies, our curricula, our practices and collaborations, a world that sustains and holds many worlds. But what could the materiality of the pluriverse look like in the study of religion? Or how can the pluriverse materialize?

Connecting with the importance of materiality for the project of decolonizing colonial materiality, deliberated on earlier in the article, I wish to draw attention to materiality in the study of religion. I argue that the material turn in the study of religion is a rich resource for undisciplining. A focus on materiality is necessary to decenter the anthropocentrism that continues to dominate the study of religion and to enable us to think differently about “the stuff of religion” (Chidester 2018). Acknowledging that materialities, organic and inorganic, embody and convey meanings that tap into religious registers of what constitutes the sacred, materialities straddle, make porous, and entangle the binaries of nature/culture and religious/secular. Considering the long history within the study of religion of focused attention on e.g., artifacts, relics, images, buildings and places, including attention to sensory and affective registers such as soundscapes and smellscapes (if I may),17 there is arguably still more material terrain to explore perhaps particularly connected to materiality as “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010)18, “material absences” (Meyer 2024), and the decolonial mattering of religious matter. Federico Settler’s (2018) incisive engagement with race and materiality in the context of South Africa is instructive in this regard. Drawing on public debates and governmental responses in South Africa pertaining to the need to regulate new religious movements, Settler argues that

“through activating or invoking the agentic potential of everyday things, it [new religious movements] asserts a new archaeology and taxonomy of religious objects premised on the need to incorporate and take seriously African or black religious ways of knowing and being […] it requires suitable, indigenous methodologies for making intelligible these (new) invocations of the sacred in everyday things, instead of contesting, dismissing, and excluding or regulating these materializations of religion, as they spill into the postcolonial public domain”.

(Settler 2018, pp. 48–49)

Settler underscores the decolonial potential of South African new religious movements to open and interrupt reductive knowledge-making practices (be it in religious studies or through the religious boundary work of governing bodies). He emphasizes their creativity in meaning-making, their (for some, indecent) use of artifacts (such as spraying Doom, an insecticide, on congregants for protection), and connected bodily practices (such as congregants eating grass to get closer to God), which reconstitute what and for whom materialities matter (Settler 2018, p. 51). Settler’s discussion on race and materiality astutely illuminates the lingering and unfortunate hegemony of unmarked privilege, noting, and rightly so, the dominant “deracialized” engagement of material religion scholars (Settler 2018, p. 51). After all, being dedicated not only to ‘objects’ but also to the ways in which the body interacts, connects with, becomes with, embodies (absorbs, ingest, digests) and experiences (contested) materialities of the sacred, the study of material religion ought to be more invested in the various ways in which racialized, gendered and queer bodies, with connected complex histories that have inculcated immeasurable and disparate body burdens, inform the meaning-making of materiality, their relationality, and the constitution of the sacred. Paying increased attention to histories, location, and embodiments—the coming into being through, amongst other things, processes of racialization—the material turn in religion has the potential to probe more extensively the modes of connection and meaning-making that emerge when bodies come to matter.

Employing materiality as an undisciplining tool renders visible the material effects of colonial discourse and epistemology. It illuminates the materiality of coloniality in the study of religion. For example, what does the proclivity towards objects tell us about the continuing trend to theorize materiality according to nature/culture dichotomies? What difference does it make to theorize materiality from the epistemologies of the dispossessed (of land, of place)? What insights might the material absences of marginalized epistemologies in the study of religion teach us about the constitution of the sacred? Acknowledging and noticing the material presence and absence in the study of religion may help us to reconceive knowledge about religion that is attuned to pluriversality. Moreover, using materiality as an undisciplining tool is not detached from experience. By deliberately foregrounding the various ways in which materiality is constituted for those unworlded by colonialism—echoing my example of Sarah Baartman earlier in this article—we presence materialities that transform and reimagine the materiality of the study of religion.

Finally, employing materiality as an undisciplining tool invites us to decentre the unmarked Human (with His atomized and bounded understanding of Himself), clearly resounded in Settler’s article. Such an approach opens a vibrant terrain to examine the entanglements of human relationalities with the more-than-human in ways that might allow for materialities to speak, enabling new modes of knowability and being and becoming with each other.

5. Colonial Discharge and Compostables for the Pluriverse

Encircled by the fading paintings of dead white men hoisted in weighty golden frames, I take a seat at the table in one of the University of Oslo’s faculty boardrooms. With intense stares that pierce my neck, invoking (in me) histories of exclusion and displacement, memories of non-belonging, I set in motion the meeting I came here to lead. I, too, belong now. Despite the constant reminder by artifacts, buildings, and university avenues, somewhat fossilized but nevertheless carrying epistemological weight into the present, I, too, can traverse these corridors, I, too, can inhabit the dominant homosocial spaces and partake in the knowledge-producing endeavors of the academy. But in what way do I do this? And why? And, what to do with the colonial discharge?

In this article I have highlighted many decolonizing orientations that inform possibilities for undisciplining religion. I have illuminated the need to decolonize knowledges in order to make space for pluriversality in the ‘university of tomorrow’. I have centered attention on materiality as critical for knowledge-making that not only wrestles with colonial pasts and the coloniality of the present but also as material and embodied sites for transformation. In 2021, the Jaggar Library at the University of Cape Town, which housed the Special Collections (comprising, among other collections, the African Studies Collection and rare antiquarian books), was subject to a runaway fire, leaving the esteemed library in ashes. For many, the losses were described as “irreplaceable reminders of where we have come from and who came before us”.19 For others, the loss was ambiguous; it represented (in part) the loss of the colonial archive. In the process of commemorating, rebuilding, and reimagining a ‘new archive’, the book Stories from the Ashes—Africa’s Story through the Last Millenium was made, penned in the ashes from the fire. The transubstantiation of matter (if I may draw on a known religious repository here) is striking and evocative.

The undisciplining of religion, a discipline informed by the imperialism of the past and the coloniality of the present, presents us with a critical, yet creative, potential. It is about memory work, commemorating what was lost while also breathing into life and birthing new decolonial knowledges and materialities that challenge us to engage in more complex meaning-making. The ambiguous histories they hold invite us, on the one hand, to consider how we dispose of “sacred waste” (Stengs 2014),20 transposed here to mean the lingering relics and knowledge regimes of our discipline and what may constitute ‘the sacred’ of the present, on the other. I am drawn to the feminist creative engagement with compost. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Hamilton and Neimanis (2018) ask, “What compostables make compost”? Employing compost as a material metaphor to assess the field of environmental humanities, they highlight the need to compost with care and the necessity of composting practices to be reflective of social justice concerns and agendas. Such composting practices, they argue, are “necessary for growing different kinds of worlds” (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, p. 501). Undisciplining religion through the careful labor of selecting meaningful and usable compostables—epistemologies and materialities that aid us in reconceiving a decolonial study of religion—composting that which aids us in responding to Anthropocene concerns, carefully attending to the decomposition of weeds metamorphized into nutrients for the future, I believe, is central to enable the vibrancy of an inclusive pluriverse.