The papers in this session begin with place and consider the ways extraction and religion interact in the context of particular geographies. Continuing conversations from 2023 EER sessions on methodological and epistemological extractivism, this session features scholars each approaching extractivism in relation to a particular place. Panelists employ a variety of methods – textual, ethnographic, and historical – to analyze the imbrications of extractive economies and religious life. In addition to presenting their research, each panelist will offer specific reflections on their methods and the ways these approaches situate their work in relation to land, local inhabitants, local lifeways, and extractivist practices. Stephanie Gray draws on firsthand testimony and theoretical framing to examine the entwinement of settler colonialism, natural resource extraction, and human exploitation in the West Bank. Oriane Lavole’s research on the Tibetan Buddhist Treasure Tradition draws on a case study of Chokgyur Lingpa’s 1866 revelation at Sengö Yamtso to begin to articulate an ethics of extraction. And Emma Gerritsen draws on oral histories of 20th century Appalachian coal camps and villages to analyze the role of land in lived religion.
Mohamed Meziane’s States of the Earth attends to the materiality of the phenomenon we’ve come to call “secularism.” Far from just a set of beliefs, orientations, or even behaviors, secularism performs literally dirt-y work, unearthing the treasures of Earth in the name of industrial paradise. Material as this work undoubtedly is, Meziane suggests it is framed by a cosmo-theological revolution. Cosmologically, the heavens are “sacrificed” or “dissolved” in favor of an increasingly disemboweled Earth. Theologically, the sovereign is (both numerically and geographically) fragmented and disseminated.
In appreciation of the author’s cosmotheomaterial account of the secular, this response turns to the recent techno-industrial recreation of human efforts in space. How might we understand the increasingly entrepreneurial storming of the “dissolved” heavens? As self-professed saviors design extra-terrestrial colonies built from lunar and asteroidal mines, are we witnessing an extension, transformation, or reversal of the secular-etractive paradigm? What do we make of the abandonment of heaven for Earth as the techno-prophets abandon Earth for the heavens?
In The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization, Mohamed Amer Meziane contends that “Secularization is not the decline of religion but the birth of a new climatic order” (xiv). Using Sylvia Wynter, I trace how antiblackness and antiblack ecologies are precursors to processes of secularization as well as that which organizes not a “new climatic order,” but an enduring Christian medieval geographic order that blackens the weather (Sharpe, 2016) to denigrate black people and black spaces. As such, the blackening of climates unveils the “energic” function of black fungibility (Hartman, 1997) in which blackness is an open state of energy which can be converted from one form of energy to another (Lethabo King, 2019). Black energic fungibility subjects black bodies to forms of extraction (Williams, 1995) but also reveals other possibilities for the articulation of black life to transform itself and maneuver through and beyond what Meziane calls “states of the earth.” -cont-
Meziane’s magisterial The States of the Earth ends with a somewhat mysterious subterranean provocation. “This work,” the final sentences read, “…calls for another…work that doubles its lines by its subterranean presence, a presence irreducible to that of the fossil states of the earth.” If the Secularocene and the “sacrifice of heaven” “overturn[ed] the earth” through the colonial dissemination of empire, as Meziane insists, then what was exposed when the earth was turned over? While drill bits penetrate the depths of the earth to fuel modernity, no one has traveled to these realms of intense pressure and temperature. If the heavens were “sacrificed” as a realm of divine difference, becoming instead a material realm that mortals could investigate and (eventually) travel to, then the same sacrifice has yet to occur for the realms below the earth. Even as speculation on the heavens continues to bring science close to religion, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein has suggested, speculation on the realms below the earth has received no comparable scientific/religious rituals. -cont-
One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene.