Short Abstract

How do our objects, scales, methods, and archives shape what appears as religious or political? This panel takes African contexts as starting points for rethinking the categories and assumptions through which religion and politics are studied.

Long Abstract

Research on religion and politics in Africa has been organised around influential objects and problematics. Scholars have examined religious institutions and movements, religion–state relations, parties and elections, publics and identities, secularity and governance, development, conflict, and security. Other approaches have attended to subject formation, lived religion, gender and kinship, media, livelihood and political economy, material and sensory forms, space and infrastructure, mobility, bureaucracy, and practices of classification and documentation. These approaches bring different dimensions of religious and political life into view but also carry assumptions about where religion and politics are to be found, what counts as evidence of them, and the objects, scales, and units through which they become available to analysis.

This panel invites papers that critically reflect on these analytical choices from African contexts. How do different starting points and units of analysis shape what comes into view as religious or political? What happens when political life does not announce itself as politics, or when religious forms become consequential through practices, relations, spaces, or arrangements not organised primarily as religious?

We are particularly interested in work that treats African contexts not simply as sites in which established theories of religion and politics are applied, but as starting points from which their categories and assumptions can be reconsidered. We welcome historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary contributions that revisit established approaches, experiment with alternative objects, scales, methods, or archives, or develop concepts from African empirical and intellectual worlds that might travel beyond the settings from which they emerge.

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