Religion, Science and Violence: Imagining past Colonizing Epistemes

Decolonial thinker Sylvia Wynter has argued that the current disciplinary structure of the Western university system is inherently colonial, reflecting colonial interests and ideologies. It’s not merely the presence of these ideologies within individual disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, botany, history, and even the field of religious studies; the whole idea of the split between the humanities and the sciences was formulated by Europeans within a progressive evolutionary framework that always placed Western European humans as the most advanced (in evolution, in culture, in art, in language, in religion, etc.). What we think of as “religion” and what we think of as “science,” for example, were formulated by European intellectuals during the period of European colonization and not only reflected their experiences, but also privileged them as superior and more civilized than the experiences of other peoples. Moreover, even the basic disciplinary distinction between the human and natural sciences reflects the Western (and monotheistic) idea that humans are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world, and thus privileges Western ways of thinking, and distorts or simply excludes other perspectives. This distinction between humans and nature (and the subsequent split between religion/humanities and the sciences) was used to define and legitimize Western religious and scientific practices over and against those of other peoples, consolidating Western norms and practices as “modern,” while defining non-Western practices, behaviors, and ideas as primitive, pre-modern, superstitious, or as “magical thinking.” Ultimately, the hierarchical distinctions between human beings hinged upon what was understood as nature and what was understood as “above nature” (in particular that ideal human), connecting distinctions between humans to the distinction between human and nature, and to the disciplinary structure of the Western university. Rethinking the distinction between the humanities and the sciences, particularly our understanding of the categories of religion and science, is therefore fundamental to the task of rethinking knowledge production within the Western Academy. If the knowledge production that separated out “the human” from “nature,” and from each other, has brought us things like global climate change, mass extinction, gross economic inequity, gross environmental injustices, and institutionalized racism, sexism, ableism, and heterosexism, then it is time to re-think these modern, Western disciplines in ways that return humans to the rest of the natural world. (Ko) This panel will draw from Indigenous, decolonial, and queer theories to rethink and re-imagine the disciplinary boundaries that separate “religion” and “science.” Furthermore, we will draw from speculative fiction, poetry, popular media and art to suggest ways in which we might re-imagine the world in a non-anthropocentric, non-hetero-euro-patriarchal way. The guiding questions of this panel will be: what types of worlds can we co-create, that pay deep attention to multiple forms of embodiment (not just human) within the planetary community and the multiple perspectives that co-create worlds at any given time? What types of epistemes can we imagine that create connections and pluralism, rather than reductions and monological understandings of the world? How can multiple ways of knowing be threaded together in ways that honor these knowledge systems without having a single overarching model that contains them all? Are epistemes inherently violent as they materialize in the world and if so, is there something like a “sustainable” level of violence for the flourishing of the planetary community? Panelist topics include: "Caste as a Category in ‘Science and Religion’: Decolonizing the ‘Religious-Scientific’ World(s);" "Undisciplining to Decolonize: Challenging Epistemological Fences;" "Developing Planetary Humanities;" and "Decolonising Knowledges, Rethinking Religion and Science."