Afterword: Theos | Cosmos | Ontos: rethinking religion's politics from Latin America

Winchell, Mareike (2024) Afterword: Theos | Cosmos | Ontos: rethinking religion's politics from Latin America. American Religion, 5 (2). 201 - 224. ISSN 2643-9247

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Abstract

This afterword offers a broad commentary on the urgency of comparative studies of ethnic and religious revivalisms across Latin America. Combining attention to the contemporary revival and refashioning of Christian, Black, and Indigenous traditions in their intersections with nationalism, reparation demands, inculturation projects, and anti-extractivist politics, this volume of American Religion attends to the fleshy underbelly of an ostensibly abstracted religion in the modern world. This approach refuses to relegate these political formations either to inherited religious orders (colonial Catholicism), timeless difference (Indigenous culture), or a detached only emergent order (earth rights, other-than-human political claims, or emergent indigeneity). Likewise, the pieces refute normative social scientific paradigms that would slot such practices either on the side only of a redemptive anti-colonial politics, on the one hand, or a strangulated or domesticated difference evacuated of force through the powers of secular modernity, on the other. We have instead a supple and nuanced, fleshed out and embodied, account of how vernacular theologies and other-than-human entanglements are transforming the scope of the political. As the authors show, not only have we “never been modern,” but the “we” that can assert such a stance is one that is presumed to have passed through a historical era defined by mediation by secular liberal virtues. This issue calls such absolute mediation into question, not only for Latin America, but also more broadly for the contemporary world.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Trustees of Indiana University
Divisions:	Anthropology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BL Religion J Political Science G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Date Deposited:	14 Jun 2024 10:15
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2024 16:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/123870

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