Beyond Religion and Belief
Uncertainty and Religious Studies for the Anthropocene
Milan Fujda [+–]
Masaryk University, Brno
Milan Fujda is an assistant professor at the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Brno. He has published two monographs in Czech, one on the cultural transfer of yoga into Czech society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and one (together with Dušan Lužný) on the Hare Krishna movement in the Czech Republic. Since 2012 he has been working on incorporating Actor-Network-Theory protocol and ontological turn into religious studies to develop an approach that bypasses the hegemonic and misleading concept of religion. He continuously elaborated on religious studies as the studies of the management of uncertainty intertwined with ontological politics. Apart from authoring various individual papers, he participated in a collective volume The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate edited by Peik Ingman et al (2016).
Nowadays, within a large project on societal resilience, he is reflecting on vaccination controversies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to study the societal process of uncertainty management and its social and economic implications for various involved parties.
Nowadays, within a large project on societal resilience, he is reflecting on vaccination controversies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to study the societal process of uncertainty management and its social and economic implications for various involved parties.
For the scholarly discipline of religious studies, this is finally an optimistic book demonstrating how to fulfil the initial intentions of its founders without recourse to the hegemonic, colonising and theoretically misleading concept of religion. The book achieves this goal by translating intuitions of the functionalist tradition originated by Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard into the project of following actors throughout their struggles with uncertainty. It shows how this decolonial approach transforms the marginal discipline of the exotic into a fundamental scholarly endeavour for tackling the challenges of the Anthropocene.
