Convenors
Matteo Bollini, Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples
matteo.bollini@unimore.it
Salvatore Senatore, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
salvatore.senatore@unimore.it
To say that “religion” has changed can mean more than one thing. Alongside its putative object, the social scientific study of religion has itself undergone profound and far-reaching reconfigurations over the last three decades. Impulses toward these shifts have come from different, and not always converging, fronts. Historical inquiry has shown that the category of religion is a Western notion, developed and imposed on the rest of the world from the sixteenth century onward; postcolonial scholarship has highlighted academia’s complicity in naturalizing Western socio-cognitive scaffolding, pointing out how Western scholarship has effectively turned its own folk classifications into universals; and theoretical developments influenced by post-structuralism have cast a shadow over any inquiry that assumes trans-historical entities and stable meanings. These currents have variously called into question what religion “is,” how we ought to study it, and even whether there is anything to study at all. Given not only the analytical but also the ethical and political consequences at stake, critique alone is not enough: new conceptualizations must mark a difference that makes a difference.
Starting from the premise that every researcher of religion brings their own pre-understandings to the field, this panel offers a space for scholars to make these explicit and to reflect on how recent critical interventions have affected their research practices: how they define and negotiate their position in the field, formulate research questions, decide which data count as relevant, set expectations, and engage with participants.
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from ethnographers and qualitative researchers interested in what a reflexive study of religion might mean in a postcolonial world. Topics may include, but are not limited to, studies of transnational religious communities, new religious movements, secular and anti-religious movements, religion and gender, and religious political mobilization.
Open questions
- What kinds of definitions of “religion” and “religious practice” can be put to use? What advantages and drawbacks do they present?
- Is there a way out of the Eurocentric nature of our categories? How can they be negotiated in the field?
- What new research avenues have recent critical developments opened, and how have these insights been operationalized in practice?
- Given the dialectical relationship between theory and fieldwork, how has your practice fed back into your conceptual framework?
- What are the ethical and political implications of doing fieldwork in the study of religion today?
Keywords
religion, fieldwork, reflexivity, postcolonial critique, theory of religion
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, critical religion, cultural studies, religious studies, reflexive studies of religion
Convenors’ bio
Matteo Bollini is a PhD candidate at the Italian Doctoral School of Religious Studies (DREST) at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples. His main areas of research include the analysis of how the category of religion is mobilized in public discourse from a discursive perspective, meta-theoretical issues in the sociological study of religion, and the epistemological and political implications of social constructionism for the study of religion and reality.
Salvatore Senatore is a PhD candidate at the Italian Doctoral School of Religious Studies (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia). His doctoral research focuses on the study of discursive productions promoted and circulated by Islamic religious authorities in Southern Italy, specifically in Salerno and its province. He holds a degree in Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Furthermore, he has refined his study of the Arabic language at the “Dar Comboni” Institute in Cairo and deepened his knowledge of the Moroccan Arabic at the University “Al Akhawayn” of Ifrane.