Decolonizing Religious Studies
October 21 @ 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Join us for a lecture by Natalie Avalos on “Decolonizing Religious Studies.”
Abstract: As religious studies scholars, it is critical for us to explore the racialized perceptions of non-Western religious traditions and peoples as well as to trace how these peoples continue to be structurally dispossessed because of those perceptions. Until recently, Native American and Indigenous religious traditions were perceived by anthropologists and scholars of religion as failed epistemologies. Their views were pathologized as childish and superstitious, evidence that they lacked the rationality to govern themselves or lay legitimate claims to their own lands. Settler colonial projects used these ideologies to justify Indigenous enslavement, genocide, and dispossession. Decolonizing religious studies means making the hierarchies that exist materially among peoples and their knowledge systems legible. It also means reclaiming and re-centering Indigenous epistemologies, given their historically violent subjugation. When these discursive legacies and their material stakes are made visible, they can be transformed.
Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent.