Summary

Academic attention to Indigenous religions has grown steadily since the 1990s in parallel with increasing attention to the lived, material dimensions of religions. The global emergence of the subfield of material religion in the late 1990s began to highlight the often taken-for-granted and marginalized material aspects of religions by placing religious “things” front and center within cutting-edge debates. Paying scholarly attention to geographical sites, temples, ritual tools, texts, clothing, language, the body, and the things that people use to live their religions with and through began to unmask a scholarly heritage that privileges mind over matter, subjects over objects, culture over nature, the sacred over the profane, and metaphysics over the tangible. Simultaneously, the 1990s saw the re-emergence of Indigenous religions as an area of interest for the study of religions. These two trajectories, while at first seemingly unrelated, are both responding to a transformative and decolonizing shift in the study of religions, where researcher positionality, institutional structures, power relations, and processes are being critically and practically reassessed. Features of this shift include a series of moves in scholarship that problematize the discipline’s modern, Enlightenment, colonial legacy; emphasis on metaphysics, texts, and beliefs in the academic study of religions; and the world religions paradigm. Combining the fields of lived and material religion with the study of Indigenous religions, beginning with their related historical trajectories, offers rich and complex possibilities for the future innovative development of theories and methods. These theories and methods extend beyond established, anthropomorphic positions about material cultures, offering relational theories (such as the new animism and the new materialism) that allow Indigenous religious materialities to reveal new understandings about the ontological and other potentialities of so-called “things.”