Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The increasing internationalization of canon law studies has largely preserved traditionalist Catholic onto-epistemologies. This presentation asks what decolonization means when people from the Global South articulate positions that decolonial approaches understand as colonial legacies.

Paper long abstract

The Catholic Church, as the world's oldest continuously operating and increasingly southward-shifting global bureaucracy, is historically held together, among other things, by a body of law known as canon law, which governs Catholics worldwide. The presentation is based on participant observation conducted as a guest student at the canon law faculty of a Roman pontifical university, where people from around the world are trained to become canon lawyers and potential future Church leaders. I argue that the increasing internationalization of canon law studies has largely preserved traditionalist Catholic onto-epistemologies while simultaneously enabling limited forms of material redistribution. Engaging with anthropological debates on decolonization, the presentation demonstrates that institutional diversification does not necessarily result in epistemic pluriversality. When actors from the Global South articulate positions that decolonial approaches seek to overcome because they are understood as colonial legacies, the normative assumptions underpinning decolonization itself become unsettled.