The Governmateriality of Indigenous Religion(s)

The GOVMAT project examines different manifestations of indigeneities and religions. How do examples of such complex entities form? In each case, what do they consist of? How do they work in specific contexts? In which ways are they engaged in governing? Which possibilities are they opening? Answers to these questions are sought through long-term fieldwork-based case studies in Ethiopia, India, Costa Rica, Norway, and several other countries; through participant observation at international meetings where leaders of indigenous peoples, other politicians, researchers, artists, religious leaders, and activists share and compare their ideas and work; and through continuous attention to expositions in and across different media, museums and the art world, research and education, missionary networks, law, tourism, businesses, political processes, environmentalism, and various other fields. The project is also exploring the analytical leverage or usefulness of the concept ‘governmateriality’. What can this neologism help us discern? Our findings show that manifestations of indigeneities and religions in some circumstances can cause new appreciation, consolidation, and protection of practices, artifacts, places, and specialists, while in other settings such manifestations may engender discrimination, attacks, or even attempts at destruction. The deployment of the concept of governmateriality enables us to foreground multiple aspects of the formations and the workings of specific examples of indigeneities and religions. The concept proves productive also in examinations of the formations and the workings of many other complex entities.

This project studies how materializations of indigenous religion(s) are entangled in local and global politics. We use three complementary approaches: (1) Joint fieldwork in five influential international venues where indigenous religion(s) become manifest: a global climate summit; a session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; an Indigenous Quinquennial exhibition of art; a conference of the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism; and a meeting of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. (2) Individual case studies in Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, Norway, Peru, and Russia, where the core members of the project have done ethnographic research over many years, and where indigenous religion(s) now materialize in new and diverse ways. (3) Joint examinations of how indigenous religion(s) materialize, circulate, and act between and beyond our field sites, through social media, journalism, education, politics, law, environmentalism, tourism, proselytizing, scholarship, art, and popular culture. Introducing the concept of governmateriality, we open a new horizon for inquiries about the recognition, agency, and command of contested bodies, practices, and situations. It allows us to investigate how indigenous religion(s) materialize as acts of governance in contemporary struggles over the definition and control of subjects, objects, and environments. We highlight the ambivalent effects of indigenous religion(s) as governmateriality: the potential to obtain rights and privileges for bodies and practices manifested as indigenous and religious, but also the risk of rejection or subjugation since many actors still perceive such bodies and practices as primitive and irrational. The project produces critical insights that may change how scholars, stakeholder communities, and policy makers enact and understand indigenous religion(s). Our concept of governmateriality may prove analytically useful also beyond the study of indigenous religion(s).