Unstating Religion
Unstating religion recognizes that religion shapes those forms of life often thought to be the monopoly of the modern, secular state: law, bureaucracy, governance, territory, art, the keeping and framing of time/temporality, and violence. These forms are, in fact, created by multiple actors–both inside and outside the state–and in ways that simultaneously contest and reify frameworks of state logic. Thus, the received wisdom that modern religion is properly confined to those spaces that the state permits needs to be rethought. In particular, the privileged epistemic position of those groups most marginalized by state power presents an essential lens through which to think religion and politics now.
Unstating religion calls attention to the limits of language, including the limits of academic genres and anglophone narratives to capture what it is that religion does in our present moment, and throughout diverse histories. Unstated religion inhabits the space of creative reinvention in the interstices of the stated. Unstating religion, in its untranslatability, names the importance of engaging interlocutors outside of an anglophone academic sphere and embraces the religiousness of visual, poetic, sonic, and somatic forms.
Unstating religion underscores the fact that our archive includes unseen modes of religiosity and engagements with stately/unstately forms that operate both in this world and in others, complicating the distinction between micro- and macro-cosmic scales and opening to both the human and the nonhuman.