In this final year of the Energy, Extraction and Religion Seminar we risk posing the utopian/heterotopian question: what would it mean to think and live beyond extractivism? Counter to the techno-utopianism of progressively better, increasingly prosperous futures that also entail obscured exploitation and require bio-cultural homogenization, Lauren Berlant emphasizes, “to see like a heterotopian is to attend to and elaborate a loose assemblage of emergent lifeworlds” (2020, 14). What would this look like in the study of religion?
This panel features four papers that reflect on the ways religions may sustain or transform imaginaries of extractive futures: in the Niger Delta, in decolonial and relational utopian futures grounded in embodied practices and situated struggles, in Vodou counter-ontologies of non-possessive personhood, and in the very category of "religion" employed in religious studies.
Abstract
In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, seven decades of crude oil extraction have produced severe environmental toxicity, yet residents continue to reshape their realities through meaning-making processes that generate diverse, entangled relationships with oil. Tracing these relationships to the integration of crude oil into indigenous environmental worldviews, this paper highlights the centrality of oil in everyday spirituality, arguing that beyond its status as a capitalist commodity, crude oil deeply informs extractive and healing ritual practices.
Keywords: Oily Lifeworlds, Everyday Spirituality, Extractivism, Niger Delta.
This paper interrogates the dominance of techno-utopian imaginaries in contemporary ecological discourse. While climate transitions are often framed as technical problems solvable through renewable expansion and innovation, such visions frequently leave intact the colonial logics that produced extractivism. Drawing on Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Laurence Davis, I argue that eco-utopian futures can reproduce injustice when progress is equated with technological mastery and endless growth. The work of Imre Szeman, Mary-Jane Rubenstein in Astrotopia, and Terra Schwerin Rowe in Of Modern Extraction exposes the extractive imaginaries that underwrite such futurisms.
In response, I draw on Davis’s concept of grounded utopia and the decolonial intervention of the relational philosophy of Buen Vivir to argue that futures beyond extractivism must emerge from situated struggles, embodied practices, and decolonial cosmologies. Religion, I contend, is a crucial site for both sustaining and transforming ecological imaginaries.
What kind of subject can inhabit a post-extractivist world? Degrowth scholarship critiques growth not merely as economic policy but as a structuring ontology, yet it rarely articulates the alternative subjectivity its vision requires. This paper argues that Haitian Vodou's multi-soul philosophy and modular personhood (Strongman 2008, 2019; Daniels 2021) offers a practicable, politically actionable model of non-sovereign selfhood that directly challenges the liberal-productivist subject underwriting extractive regimes. Taking Clayton Crockett's "renewable materialism" (2022) as a point of departure, I show that ontological reframings of energy remain inadequate without confronting growth as an organizing metaphysics (Kallis 2018; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). Vodou's ritually enacted counter-ontology, forged inside plantation extraction and the Haitian Revolution, provides what abstract philosophical frameworks cannot: a living tradition of collective, non-possessive personhood already practicing what degrowth theorizes. These are the "emergent lifeworlds" (Berlant 2020) materializing beyond extractivism.
For this panel I will draw on my recent book, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, to offer cautionary tales about the hazards of “religion” as a frame for building heterotopian futures. I argue that the category of religion (and, by implication, the discipline of religious studies) has historically served to (re)inscribe a series of binaries and distinctions characteristic of colonial modernity—religion/politics, religion/science, religion/superstition, etc.—that continue to enable economies of extraction. As a provocation to the field, I want to further suggest that both the category of religion and its most determined critics have operated within the logics of what I call settler secularism to ridicule, condemn, or render illegible Indigenous and other non-extractive ways of doing and being in the world.