Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar

We invite proposals around two themes: Slippage, flow, and water/oceanic extraction & the fetish

Slippage, flow, oceanic extraction, water extraction

In As Long As the Grass Grows, Dina Gilio-Whitaker discusses the fraught relationships between (white) environmentalisms and Indigenous water protectors, tracing slippages and incongruences between the discursive frames of conventional environmental ethics, Indigenous sovereignty, and environmental justice. Relatedly, Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism shows how the scientific frameworks developed to understand “pollution” are grounded in the idea that water and land are endowed with an innate capacity to absorb the violence of settler chemical effluents. In relation to land and water, extractivist/colonial systems of knowledge are like oil and water. Recognizing the coastal location of the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting, and following Gilo-Whitaker and Liboiron, we invite papers on water and extractivism, especially those that attend to slippages and flows between culturally particular epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics of water.

We welcome paper proposals that consider the confluences of religion/theology with the blue humanities, seafloor mining, or the exploitation of fisheries. In keeping with the annual meeting theme, we especially invite proposals that reflect on violence, non-violence, and marginality in aqueous extractive zones. Though oceanic topics will be front of mind–in a conference center mere kilometers from the second largest US naval base and an influential institution of oceanography with a military history–  extractivism involves freshwater, too, including water privatization, aquifer depletion, and the impact of mining and industrial agriculture on the substance most fundamental to life itself.

Fetish

While Marx's theory of the commodity fetish is frequently cited by scholars of mining and extractivism, the term “fetish” originated in the 16th century when Portuguese merchants sought to describe the purported misvaluation of material goods by West African peoples they encountered. In addition to playing a key role in economic discourses, the fetish also played an important part in the beginning of modern religious studies. In contrast to the Portuguese merchants who associated the fetish with a kind of witchcraft, EB Tylor’s Primitive Culture theorized the fetish in terms of animism and framed it as a less developed form of religion on a scale ranging from primitive to fully developed monotheism. The fetish, then, is a conceptual tool that humanists and social scientists deployed for racialization in colonial systems of knowing and classifying “religion.” That fossil fuels and precious metals are ‘fetishized’ commodities is an irony that has not escaped energy and extraction humanities scholars (e.g. Huber 2013, Malm 2017, Szeman 2023). But with regard to the fetish, commodity fetishism, and the binding together of matter and value, scholars of religion and theology have insight to contribute to transdisciplinary conversations on this topic.

We invite papers critically engaging the employment of the fetish in energy and extraction humanities. What modes of discourse and material practice in extractive zones are obscured in discourses of the Enlightenment fetish? What violence is incited, justified, or undermined? What might be illuminated by employment of the fetish more broadly? In what ways does the study of religion help attend more closely to modes of racialization in extractive zones following the wake of the fetish?