Paper short abstract:

Replacing religious studies with studies of uncertainty is a way that follows up the initial intuitions in religious studies, overcomes miscommunications inscribed into the category "religion", and enables non-colonial ontopolitics in the era of the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

From a postcolonial perspective, the category of religion (and its paired secular) is a fundamental tool of miscommunication. It misrepresents the Western self to the non-Western other and vice versa and generates “the illusion that today’s dominant system of exploitation and inequality is sane, rational, normal, natural and the only possible game in town.” (Fitzgerald 2021: 269) While in times when the certainties of modernity were in place and the established forms of governmentality and economy seemed to work properly, criticising colonialism and exploitation inscribed in the academic practice of studying religion(s) was a purely academic concern for a narrow cycle of specialists. Now, while we are globally experiencing radical uncertainties as the direct consequences of our modern “certainties” and when our economies, policies, and life on the planet itself face fatal challenges, the question of how to compose the shared world again, but now globally sustainably, the power inscribed within this modern miscommunication strikes back with new force and calls for a radical revision of the discipline itself. In the presentation, I propose how coming back to some fundamental intuitions concerning the productive significance of uncertainty, enables religious studies to leave religion behind and become a relevant discipline within the framework of negotiating the shared world in the Anthropocene.