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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

The Governmateriality of Indigenous Religion(s)

Alternative title: The Governmateriality of Indigenous Religion(s)

Awarded: NOK 10.0 mill.

Project Number:

303429

Application Type:

Project Period:

2020 - 2025

Partner countries:

The GOVMAT project examines concrete manifestations of indigeneities and religions. How are such entities formed and how do they work in specific contexts? Who shapes them? What do they consist of? How do they interact with the environment? In which ways are they involved in governing? To provide answers to these questions, we are doing research in several sites: case studies in local communities in Bale (Ethiopia), Gujarat and Nagaland (India), Sakha (Siberia), Sápmi (Scandinavia), Talamanca (Costa Rica and Panama), and various other places; observations at international meetings where representatives of indigenous peoples, politicians, researchers, artists, and religious leaders gather to share their projects and visions; and explorations of presentations and exchanges in and between fields like education, tourism, proselytizing, traditional and new media, health, law, museums, and environmentalism. At the same time, through interdisciplinary collaboration, we are testing the analytical usefulness of the concept ‘governmateriality’. What can it expose? Our provisional findings suggest that manifestations of particular indigeneities and religiosities may sometimes prompt extra awareness and protection of certain practices, places, artifacts, and/or persons, while on other occasions such manifestations may provoke discrimination, rejection, or attempts at reformation, conversion, or even destruction. The concept of governmateriality allows us to scrutinize several aspects of the formation and power of concrete examples of indigeneities and religiosities alongside 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).

Publications from Cristin

Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam