Religions in Extractive Zones: Methods, Imaginaries, Solidarities

Abstract

This essay serves as an expansive, conceptual anchor and scholarly argument that demonstrates the modality of “reflexive extractivist” religious studies and also orients the Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones. We demonstrate that critical religious and theological scholarship have existing tools and methods for deepening the study of extraction in the environmental humanities and related discourses. We make two interconnected arguments: that religion has been and continues to be produced out of extractive zones in the conflicts, negotiations, and strategic alliances of contact zones and that the complex production of sacred and secular in these zones can be fruitfully analyzed as imaginaries and counter-imaginaries of extraction. We present these arguments through a dialogical and critically integrative methodology, in which arguments from theorists across several disciplines are put into conversation and from which our insights emerge. This methodology leads to a final section of the essay that sets a framework for, and invites further dialogical and integrative scholarship on, the practical ethics of non- or counter-extractive academic research, scholarship, and publishing. Offering theoretical, methodological, and practical suggestions, we call for a turn toward reflexive extractivist religious studies, articulate the specific conceptual and methodological approaches linking religion and extraction, and thus set the framework and tone for the Special Issue.

1. Religion and Extractive Zones?

Extraction is the thrum and rhythm of many contemporary political economies. As omnipresent yet often euphemized, invisibilized, or distanced, extraction is the throughline of the modern capitalist-state. With deep anchors in colonial histories, extraction depends on continuing racialization and maintenance of ontological hierarchies through economic property regimes, progressive developmentalist temporalities, and extractive imaginaries—and it is not going anywhere. Even if a transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable sources was accomplished, extraction would be expanded and intensified since batteries, solar panels, and digital infrastructures require increased extraction of minerals like copper and lithium. A spring 2024 report by the European Commission, for example, projects a 21-fold increased demand for lithium and 6–7-fold increase for rare earth metals by 2050—all for e-vehicles, energy storage, solar panels, and wind turbines (Directorate-General for Energy 2024). The reach of extraction now encompasses the breadth of human vision, extending from the greatest macro to the minutest micro: from outer space where asteroids are proposed sites of future mineral extraction (Rubenstein 2022), to DNA for knowledge production and de-extinction experimentation (Sideris 2024; Skrimshire 2016; TallBear 2017).

It is as true for fields of vision as it is for academic analysis that an interpretive lens, newly donned and keenly crafted, can help to alleviate myopias in perception. In fields of study across the humanities and social sciences, the concept of extraction is currently serving that clarifying function, even as the terms extractavismo/extractivism and scholarship on the phenomenon of extraction—including, but not limited to, its mineralogical forms—are not in themselves new (Acosta 2013; Galeano [1973] 1997). What is distinctive, however, is the contemporary scholarly efflorescence of attention to how the analytic lens of extractivism concatenates layered dynamics: structures and institutional proclivities under various conditions of political economy and ecology; human and community behaviors that form the ritualization around, the social normalization of, or ethical resistance to, extractive industry; racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism; conceptualizations of the values of minerals, nonhuman species, and ecosystems; and questions about the purpose and purview of ongoing human technological prowess, innovation, and impact on geology as well as biology.

As geographical spaces, extractive zones—a term we define in greater detail below, in light of contemporary scholarship, along with clarifications on extraction/extractivism—mark shared, conflictual, interactive, and responsive ways of living in relation to and valuing matter. Inhabitants, communities, species, corporations, nations, international bodies, scientists, and activists meet in extractive zones—all marking out or approaching these spaces with ritualized practices, narratives, traditions, and systemic/institutional forces. As such, we submit that these zones are sites of religious contestation, where often disproportionate conflicting and competing ways of valuing matter, land, and relations meet, respond, combat, and alter one another.1 Extractive zones are the literal and conceptual topographies of #NoDAPL, the North Sea, Basrah, Oak Flat, Tar Sands, Potosí, Witwatersrand, Appalachia, and more. At stake, both explicitly and implicitly, for protestors, activists, water protectors, corporate actors, institutional representatives, and policy implementers are contested visions of the good community and community goods. It is not only the case that communities enter into extractive zones with contrasting religious proclivities, rituals, narratives, and ethical commitments; we will also argue that extractive zones also produce new forms of religion in these contexts.

As much as these are turbulent spaces of conflict, contestation, and disproportionate power negotiated and deployed between diverse cosmovisions, it is now clear that many disjunctions between modern religion and modern extraction were smoothed long ago. Just as Euro-American scientific theories of religion ranked religious phenomena in hierarchical relationships from lower to higher, primitive to civilized, so too logics of extraction proceed in similar ways, driven by the assumption that civilization evolves and is (literally) fueled through appropriation of resources, generally from cultures deemed inferior in rank but rich in the kinds of materials that drive innovation. Such temporal assumptions of linear civilizational development mean that seemingly distinct rhetorics of both religion and extraction can amplify one another. Indeed, in many cases of dominant forms of Western Christianity, they have been in lockstep. For example, presiding Euro-American Christian tropes of manifest destiny, freedom, expansionism, exceptionalism, millennialism, and final frontiers have been historically invoked and continue to be touted as justifications for the further exploitation of people and resources, with an assumed inevitability of divinely ordained progress (Bentancor 2017; Dochuk 2019; LeMenager 2005; Rubenstein 2022).

This Special Issue of Religions is oriented around the theme of “religion in extractive zones” to signal extraction as an important nexus concept, the analysis of which requires more attention in terms of religious proto-structures and substrates, as well as emergent forms. In one iteration this means that we are attuned to how religion, in its many and multiply contested forms, has been co-extensive and co-developed with extractive regimes for labor and resources, in ways that are likely to continue into the future. In another iteration, we find that topics, methods, and attunements in the study of religion can help to illuminate some of the more recondite or as-yet-under-theorized aspects of extraction in discourses such as the energy humanities or petroculture studies—just as the latter can help to clarify and improve aspects of the study of religion. Furthermore, among robust existing approaches to religion, empire, coloniality, and capitalism, focused attention on extractive zones offers a methodological approach particularly attuned to the imbrications of human and other-than-human domination.

This essay is intended as a stand-alone contribution that simultaneously serves as an expansive, conceptual anchor to this Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones. Its primary purpose is to call for and provide scaffolding toward “reflexive extractivist” religious studies.2 The aims of such an approach are both ethical and epistemological; we suggest that religious studies needs to more fully integrate into its theories, and pursue heightened accountability for, its enmeshment in histories and practices of extractivism. Toward these aims, in this essay, we provide clarity about certain key concepts and terms, demonstrate the embeddedness of religious studies in historical and ongoing extractive zones, provide theoretical approaches to analyzing religion in extractive zones, and highlight counter-extractive and reparative modes of scholarship engagement, from research to publication and activism. Well beyond the basic ground-clearing and foundation-setting of a typical Special Issue introduction, we make the case that critical religious scholarship has the existing tools and methods for reflexive extractivist religious studies by making two interconnected arguments: that religion has been and continues to be produced out of extractive and sacrifice zones in the conflicts, negotiations, and strategic alliances of contact zones and that the complex production of sacred and secular in these zones can be fruitfully analyzed as imaginaries and counter-imaginaries of extraction.

2. Religion and Theology, Extractivism and Extractive Zones

Discourses and methods in the study of religion may not be well known to scholars in the environmental and energy humanities and vice versa. Particularly given the interdisciplinarity of our expected audience, as well as the evident stakes of terminological fuzziness and conceptual opacity that are often employed to legitimize extraction, we would like to be as clear as possible about some key contested and polyvocal terms: religion and theology, extractivism and extractive zones.

2.1. Religion and Theology

The most problematic term we employ is “religion” itself—a designator that marks sites of contestation, resistance, coloniality, and racialization of human bodies and matter. As we describe in the next section, the modern concept of religion itself emerged in and through extractive zones. It is a term that, in its modern scientific disciplinary definition, emerged with a particular temporality of stadial evolution of civilizations, from so-called primitive peoples with either non-existent or ill-formed religion to animists and polytheists, culminating with monotheistic religions and, in particular, Christianity, including its secularized Enlightenment forms (Long 2018d). Rather than a universal essence, an anthropological reality observed among every people, or a basic human trait, in this Special Issue, we understand religion as a concept that emerged from a European gaze in transcultural colonial contexts through comparative and evaluative modes of assessing other peoples and their ways of life. As Mohamed Amer Meziane emphasizes in his recent illuminating analysis of religion, secularity, and extraction, taking this critical approach to the study of religion means that “[r]ather than trying to determine what religion is by attributing a problematic universality to it, other questions present themselves: Who defines religion? Who wields the power to define others’ religion?” (Meziane 2024, p. 10). Such questions are not only theoretical; they emerge with heightened significance in contexts where religion has been legally codified such that, depending on its definition, a practice (like contesting extractive activities on sacred grounds) may or may not be legible, let alone legally/constitutionally protectable, as religious.3

In attending to constructions of religion, our approach is to use the term “religion” while simultaneously problematizing it. This move is described by David Chidester, building from David Morgan, as “simultaneous destruction and preservation—canceling and keeping, disposing and transposing” (Chidester 2018, p. 2). In this simultaneous canceling and keeping, we pay critical attention to the distinctive features of what became modern religion. These features include a self-contained sphere marked off from and often opposed to the secular, whether that be science, politics, economics, or culture more broadly shared; a phenomenon imagined to be continually retreating in an inevitable drive of civilizations toward rationalization and secularization; a private set of experiences confined to inner spaces of the domestic sphere or individual psyche; a realm of supposedly mindless ritual/ceremony/tradition or emotionality (as opposed to rationality); and something oriented primarily around belief rather than material relations (Asad 1993; Long 2018d; J. Z. Smith 1998). Again, the Eurocentrism of this construction makes itself visible; each of those characteristics reflect and make room for some cosmovisions over against others. In particular, they mark many non-Western and most Indigenous lifeways as variously uncategorizable, unrecognizable, or illegitimate. This is especially, but not only, the case in a presumptively Christian, European register (L. T. Smith [1999] 2012).

Recognizing the predominance of imperial Christian theological influences on processes of racialization (Carter 2008; Keel 2018; Jennings 2011), the construction of the category of religion, and extractive imaginaries (Rowe 2023a), this Special Issue also traverses theological discourses. While theology has traditionally been understood within the context of confessional observance and reflection, we employ the term as a way of signaling intentional, often strategic or pragmatic, modes of making appeals within the symbolic structures, histories, rituals, and cultural traditions of a particular religious tradition. Along these lines, religious environmental ethicist Willis Jenkins explains that “[t]heological’ does not always mean ‘confessional’ or even ‘god-related.’ … for some religionists, theology stands for a pluralist, pragmatist commitment to work with the cultural inheritances that inform how particular communities of discourse interpret the world around them” (Jenkins 2017, p. 27). Similarly, in articulating both anti-blackness and modes of resistance to it, J. Kameron Carter implores scholars to “release the study of what is called religion (including the study of what is called black religion) from being locked up inside of the study of church history or the study of religion at the level of recognizably religious institutions and cultic orders and their attendant theological architectures. To release the study of religion from such frameworks creates room for an understanding of religion as a structuring imagination of matter and culture” (Carter 2023, p. 4). Such moves can be both constructive and critical. A critical turn is particularly evident among postsecular and political theologies analyzing logics of divinity, the sacred, or authoritative articles of faith as they function even in what seem to be non-religious or secular modes. As Catherine Keller and Clayton Crockett have noted, “political theology is practicing attention to the incarnations and transformations of religion into secular structures” (Keller and Crockett 2022, p. 3). In many cases, “religio-secular entanglements do not always register on a conscious linguistic level before influencing drives, desires, alliances, and actions” (Rowe 2023a, p. 17). In this sense, theology can refer to whole systems of belief and ritual practice that might not be explicitly religious but function as modes of faith “legitimizing and justifying extractive strategies” (Gudynas 2016). We say more about this kind of approach when we engage the topic of religious imaginaries in subsequent sections.

2.2. Extractivism and Extractive Zones

Another key term for this Special Issue is extractivism/extractivismo. The term extractivism invites reflection on interrelated but distinguishable terms like extraction, extractive zones, and extractive capitalism. In this Special Issue, we rely on and amplify the insights of Eduardo Gudynas, who has spent decades studying extractive systems, practices, and policies in Latin America. In this capacity, he has witnessed the effects of extractivism on local communities as well as the logics employed by corporations, state actors, and international bodies to justify, explain, legitimize, or invisibilize extractive endeavors. In his descriptions and characterizations, Gudynas resists the application of the language of extractivism to realms beyond the extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and monocultures at high volume and intensity, of which more than 50% are destined for export (Gudynas 2020, p. 6). Given the rise in academic discourse on extraction/extractivisms, he emphasizes the importance of definitional precision and offers important cautions about what he takes as increasing slippage in terminology, conceptual fuzziness, and categorical sloppiness.4

In particular, Gudynas is concerned with the way industry executives have been able to capitalize on expansive uses of terminology. For example, he argues that the term “extractive industry” is a “conceptual error” often used to emphasize the economic importance of extractive endeavors for nations or regions (Gudynas 2020, p. 8). The term is misleading and “not innocent” because it falsely invites an assumption that extraction creates many jobs in communities by invoking

an imaginary of factories with workers, serving to promote and legitimize extractivism among society. This view of extractivism is undoubtedly an exaggeration, not only because these factories do not exist [at the site of extraction itself] but also because the demand for employment by extractivisms is low and there is little value added in the extraction process … In extractivisms there is no production as such … The use of the term ‘production’ is part of the confusion of presenting extractivisms as an industry that produces goods.

(ibid.)

As Gudynas emphasizes, this distinction is crucial for countering “government and business rhetoric that defends extractivism as supplying ‘industrial’ goods” (ibid., p. 9). Along these same lines, Gudynas argues that extractivism is often used as a term synonymous with capitalism and that this too is a consequential misconceptualization; while there are often key overlaps and imbrications as analyzed under the rubric of extractive capitalism, extractivism occurs across multiple different forms of governance and political economic arrangement, ranging from capitalist to socialist to resource nationalist societies.

In addition, Gudynas’ call for more precision in the use of the term extractivism is useful in addressing common slides in logic that would naturalize extractivism as inevitable or essential for the human endeavor. When academics began broadening the term to encompass a variety of phenomena—“urban, financial, epistemological, cognitive and even musical extractivisms” (Gudynas 2020, p. 4)—such expansions created ambiguity that “was exploited by some advocates of mining and oil companies to insist that any use or abuse of Nature was ultimately extractivism, and therefore it should be tolerated and protected as a fundamental condition for humanity survival” (ibid.). This logic that implies the necessity of extractive endeavors can be found in some rhetoric about the legitimacy or inevitability of mining and other forms of extraction. Proponents of extractivism argue, often in reference to Indigenous populations, that local populations have for millennia mined specific minerals, for example. Another tack of this inevitability argument for extraction is that the survival of the human body or human civilization depends on the extraction of nutrients for survival. Both of these logics require further interrogation. We therefore concur with Gudynas’ insistence on precision in terms and, here, will use extractivism to signal processes of high volume, high intensity, and high export that are neither “inevitable” nor “natural”.

Where Gudynas restricts terminological expansion beyond high volume and intensity of extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and monocultures, primarily for export, Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta has also importantly insisted that “extractivism is a mode of accumulation that started to be established on a massive scale 500 years ago … [in the] conquest and colonisation of the Americas, Africa and Asia” (Acosta 2013, p. 62). Recognizing and privileging Gudynas’s resistance to the expansion of the notion of “extractivism”, we nonetheless also find Acosta’s insights—as well as the scholars who extend this work, such as Macarena Gómez-Barris (discussed below)—about historical trajectories and structural logics compelling. Gudynas himself provides a bridge between his terminological restriction and the socio-historical contexts Acosta and Gómez-Barris emphasize in his language of “spillover effects”. For Gudynas, spillover effects of his narrowly precise sense of extractivism include “changes to public policy and even shared understandings of ideas such as justice and democracy, so as to maintain and promote extractivisms. These effects are not restricted across time and space, operating into the future” (Gudynas 2020, p. 18). We suggest that these patterns also ripple out into other institutions and arrangements of social and economic life. What becomes normal and obvious is also that which conduces to the current and future project of extraction. By this, we mean to suggest that activities and logics of extractivism can resonate with others, leaching from one context (or set of institutional arrangements) into the social norms, logics, and justificatory languages of other professional, political, and social enterprises.5 This is a crucial and necessary expansion in order to think through some of the ways that the racial capitalist, imperial logics, and colonial practices of extractive zones do not limit themselves to extractivism as Gudynas sees it.

We therefore suggest that extractive zones, a term most associated with scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris, might be seen as expansive reservoirs for the spillover effects of extractivism. By extractive zone, Gómez-Barris refers “to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion” (Gómez-Barris 2017b, p. xvi). The term “names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life to commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems” (ibid., xix). For Gómez-Barris, it is clear that racial capitalism—or “the processes that historically subordinated African and Indigenous populations” (ibid., p. xvii) for commodification—accompanies extractivism and is part of what constitutes the extractive zone. We see extractive zones as spaces of extractive activities that also encompass the ripple or “spillover” effects of extractivism. These extractive activities are not extractivism themselves but rather the ripple effects that would not take place were it not for extractivism. This is where religion, finance, academia, race, politics, and gender may take on and extend extractive modes or an extractive ethos. It is in this mode that the extractive commodification of racialized bodies and labor, for example, might be identified as in the locus of the extractive zone, but differentiated from extractivism. Similarly, extractivism remains distinct from, but often relies on and overlaps with, other political, economic practices like expropriation and exploitation. While we do not have space here to fully explicate and theorize these overlaps, imbrications, and distinctions, we would like to further signal this as an important area more broadly for future theorization.

3. Theorizing Religion in Extractive Zones: The Modern Concept of Religion and Ongoing Productions of the Sacred

We have already posited the claim that the modern concept of religion itself emerged from an extractive zone. Here, we support and expand on that claim, building on the work of critical scholars of religion like Charles Long and David Chidester who have attended to the ways religious concepts have been informed by and functioned in racial colonial contexts. Where Gómez-Barris outlines the extractive zone, scholars of religion have long relied on the concept of the “contact zone”. We argue that a close look at the particular contact zones attended to by Long and Chidester, though, reveals that these are also extractive zones. Therefore, while emphasizing the production of modern religion in historical extractive zones, we also want to emphasize the ongoing nature of this religious production in extractive zones. Recent research in religion and environment studies has demonstrated that modes of the sacred, ritual practice, and contests over definitions of religion are continually being produced in contemporary extractive zones—often where protestors and defenders come into conflict with extractive practices and their supporters.6 While many examples could be given, the focus here will be on recent research on religion in sacrifice zones.

3.1. Contact, Extractive, and Sacrifice Zones

The contact zone was famously theorized by Mary Louise Pratt, scholar of Spanish and Portuguese and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. In Imperial Eyes (Pratt 1992) and a widely cited MLA lecture, “Arts of the Contact Zone” (Pratt 1991), Pratt develops the highly influential concept of the contact zone as a “social space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination”, including colonialism and slavery, and their legacies and aftermath (p. 7). For Pratt, the contact zone is related to the idea of transculturation, a term used in ethnographic studies to describe processes “whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant metropolitan culture” (p. 36). Such a perspective recognizes the reliance of colonial perspectives on appropriated Indigenous concepts while amplifying the voices and perspectives of those subordinated by imperial projects. Contact zones and transculturation concepts help to demonstrate the active agency of the colonized through creative mimicry, revision, appropriation and reversal of dominant terms, themes, and subjectivities. Contact zones are thereby a lens for analyzing the co-constitution of subjectivities, self-understandings, and concepts that emerge when colonizers and the colonized encounter one another at length.

Building from Pratt, religion scholar Charles Long emphasizes the significance of contact zones, not just for producing subjectivities, but concepts and temporalities that would become fundamental to the modern idea of religion.7 Here, Long is both building and differentiating from the work of Mircea Eliade. As Long describes throughout texts like Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade “shows how the forms of matter (nature) evoke modes of consciousness and experience (hierophanies)” (Long 2018a, p. 117). Eliade theorized religion as “imaginaries of matter” emerging from encounters with celestial phenomena like the sun and moon, elemental interactions with rocks, minerals, and water, and of cyclical dynamics of agriculture and fertility (Long 2018a). But where Eliade’s theory relied on speculative accounts of the “origins” of religion in “primitive” worlds by attending to how religious imaginations emerged in what might retroactively be identified as human/nature contact zones, Long’s critical theory applies this approach to transcultural rather than “primitive” human/nature contact zones that became foundational for the modern world and its imaginaries8. One such site is particularly evident in the notion of the fetish.

Particularly salient for the study of religion in extractive zones, Long highlights the importance of contact zones for producing the concept of fetishism that became foundational for the modern understanding of religion—a concept, we will emphasize, that emerges in a contact zone that is also an extractive zone. In analyzing the role of fetish discourse on Enlightenment concepts of materiality, subjectivity, and religion, Long relies heavily on intellectual historian William Pietz’s three widely influential essays on the problem of the fetish (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988).9 In these essays, Pietz outlines his dialectical materialist method that can be seen to inform Long’s approach to contact zones as well:

The dialectical-materialist approach to the history of theory assumes that theory begins in the consciousness of contradiction, which leads historical actors to reflect … within a concrete historical situation and in terms of the discourse and categories formed in the pragmatic interactions that form the essence of any concrete historical context. Theory develops in the effort to explain and resolve such experienced contradictions by transforming the essential terms of the discourse proper to a type of historical interaction into the noncontradictory concepts of a formal system.

(Pietz 1988, p. 109, fn 8)

For Pietz, new terms and concepts are produced in contexts of conflicting or contradicting concepts and in attempts to resolve them. As Long emphasizes, building from Pietz’s work, the racial–religio–economic concept of the fetish emerged first among Portuguese merchants as they encountered West Africans on what became known as the Gold Coast. The term (feitiço) was the result of attempts to make sense of behaviors and values that did not fit within the Catholic Portuguese merchant’s existing categories for religious, economic, and social values. Pietz thus traces the intellectual history of fetish discourse as a series of contradictions between European perceptions of African religio-economic practices, Christian European expectations of divinity and materiality, an emerging commercial commodity consciousness, and attempted resolutions of these contradictions resulting in the production of new concepts, values, and ideas that infused the European Enlightenment.

Eventually, the term fetish was transformed into the concept of fetishism in the Enlightenment by Charles de Brosses, where it would inform theories of human moral and intellectual development that could be traced according to a continuum of religions stretching from irrational fetishists to primitive animists to fully rational Christian monotheists (de Brosses and Morris 2017). Informing early theorists of religion from Kant and Hegel, to theories of animism articulated by E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, these concepts became the roots of the modern science of religion (Long 2018c, p. 367). Thus, for Long, modern religion (and the correlative Enlightenment scientific study of religion) was produced in this series of exchanges, contradictions, and efforts to explain and resolve such conflicts in the extended contact zones between European merchants and West African populations.

Long traces the fetish as it influences the modern concept of religion—and also as it informs shifts in imaginaries of matter. Building again from Pietz’s work, Long writes that from the contact zone of West Africa,

a new notion of materiality enters into the Western consciousness. The earlier theological notions of matter were always in one way or another linked to God’s work in creation and the New Creation initiated by Jesus, the Christ. The discussion of fetishism allowed for an alternative, and quite disparate, notion of matter and materiality. The term ‘came to express a novel idea in European theoretical reflections and to thematize a novel general problem: that of the nature and origin of the social value of material objects’.

(Long 2003, p. 175, citing Pietz)

Long thus attributes ideas, like the free subject, unconstrained by traditional metaphysical hierarchies, matter with “no inherent value”, and commodities as matter “whose value is realized only in exchange”, not solely to the experience of industrialization, nor primarily the genius of Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, and political economists, but to the transcultural exchange and misconstrual of ideas in the contact zones of West Africa. Long furthermore demonstrates how such imaginaries of matter produced in contact zones get folded back into extractive practices; “In one movement”, he writes, fetishism was attributed to “enslaved Africans themselves as a false religion”. In another movement, fetishism was “transferred to the notion of matter and materiality, this time to African bodies, which became a locus of matter in the form of chattel” (Long 2018b, p. 283). We take such analysis of imaginaries—emerging from contact/extractive zones and recirculating, being fed back into extractive zones, and producing extractive imaginaries of commodities, commodification, and enslavement—as a crucial perspective that religious studies offers to the theorization of extractive zones. More than offering descriptive clarity of the extractive zone, though, Long’s focus on the fetish as produced in extractive zones and refracted back into them to legitimize logics of appropriation, dispossession, and transshipment also suggest the need for further analysis of important critical concepts employed to analyze extractivism like commodity fetishism.10 While Long emphasized that these concepts emerged in transcultural contact zones, given their locations on the African Gold Coast with emerging traffic of enslaved persons and mineral wealth, we suggest they should also be theorized as extractive zones.

Jennifer Reid emphasizes that “Long’s specific contribution to this tradition of scholarship has been in probing the ways in which the study of religion has been informed by both the methods of the Enlightenment sciences and also the data extracted from various geographical locations that constituted the arena of European colonial expansion” (Reid 2020, p. vii). These methods and insights are also taken up by David Chidester in his analysis of religion and empire. Following Long, Chidester has traced imbrications of mineral and knowledge extraction that became the foundations of modern religion in the context of imperial projects. And echoing Pratt, Chidester defines contact zones as sites of intercultural encounter, marked by the unequal power dynamics created and enforced by colonization. Thus, religion, too, Chidester writes, has been “fashioned and refashioned in the asymmetrical power relations of colonial contact zones” (Chidester 2020, p. 4). Colonial efforts to exert control over the colonized are often met with resistance as Indigenous populations renegotiate “alien impositions” (ibid.). Contact zones are thus sites of creativity, meaning-making, and resistance, where often explicit departures “from the stadial theory of human progress from savagery to civilization” materialize. Importantly, Chidester also explicitly links epistemological and mineralogical extraction in this dynamic. He writes, for example, in Religion of Empire, that in the context of “the discovery of mineral wealth in South Africa, beginning in the 1860s and expanding through the rest of the century, British theorists of religion began mining South Africa for religious data” (Chidester 2014, p. 19).11 In particular, Chidester identifies South Africa as a “crucial site of interaction” where “imperial theorists such as Friedrich Max Mueller, E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer depended on Indigenous informants and collaborators who were undergoing colonization” (ibid., p. xi).

As Chidester explicitly links mineralogical and epistemological extraction, the clear implication is that the contact zone can also be an extractive zone. Though the theorization of extractive zones and extractivism is not explicit in Long’s or Chidester’s work, we argue that these scholars have already been attending to the spillover effects of extractivism into religious and imperial subjectivities, ideals and concepts that are then fed back into logics for the legitimation of dispossession and appropriation.

The “scientific” study of religion owes its initiating moments to the concept of religion produced in and through extractive zones in past centuries. But this is not a mere historical relic or terminological dispute, since the ongoing practice of religion (whether understood through the rituals, cosmovisions and lifeways, or statements of belief and habitual orientations toward the material world informed by myth and religious meaning) constantly produces new forms and performances in changing contexts. The study of religion and environment, in particular, has attended to the ways religious practice and meaning inform, and are informed by, environmental practices and movements. For example, scholars have traced the emergence of “ecotheologies” among religious faithful who reinterpret traditional religious modes through the lens of environmental concern (S. M. Taylor 2007), as well as “dark green religions” that embed articulations of the sacred within radical environmentalisms and hiking or surfing cultures but refuse institutional religious affiliation (B. Taylor 2009). These scholars are thus attending to how new iterations and extra-institutional modes of religious expression are being produced. And, with increasing specificity and clarity, scholars and experts are attending to the ways that religion infuses and transforms through and in conflicts around extractivism—as in the work of Winona LaDuke, Darren Dochuk, Mark Clatterbuck, Nick Estes, and Joe Witt (Clatterbuck 2025; Dochuk 2019; Estes 2019; LaDuke 2016; Rowe 2023a; Witt 2016). So, while it remains the case that a historically significant turn toward modern religion emerged through extractive zones as Long and Chidester have emphasized, we also want to stress that religion continues to be produced through contests, negotiations, creative syntheses, and conflicts in current extractive zones.

In that vein, we suggest that the role of contact and extractive zones in producing new concepts and forms of religion is further demonstrated in the recent theorization of a third type of theorized “zone” that has emerged in activist and scholarly consciousness: the sacrifice zone. While sacrifice zones are often understood to encompass places like toxic dumping sites (thereby signifying pollution by addition more than destruction by mining or other forms of removal), we would like to point out that there are also often geographical overlaps between extractive and sacrifice zones; toxic wastes, for example, are byproducts of extractive endeavors that must be located somewhere. Sites of extraction and sites of toxic dumps, in their imbrications and differences, emerge as key contact zones where complex and polysemic values, interests, and practices intersect, struggle, and are renegotiated. Ryan Juskus has outlined a history of the concept of “sacrifice zones”12 where he argues for the relevance of this designator over and against other options (like “fenceline communities” or “dumping grounds”), primarily because “sacrifice zone” accounts for the way the term often functions in cases of environmental injustice, as activists attempt to reframe a site of socio-environmental degradation as sacred and thus worthy of preservation and protection. Juskus does not connect sacrifice zones to contact zones or to the critical histories of the study of religion, as we do here, but we concur with his insight about the resonance with deployment and contestation over notions of sacrifice and sacredness. Consequently, we argue that extraction-adjacent sacrifice zones also could be approached as contact zones where through contestations, exchanges, and conflicts, new forms of religion are being produced.13

3.2. Imaginaries of Matter in Extractive Zones

We have been emphasizing the ways extractive and sacrifice zones can be approached as contact zones and that certain religion scholars have, in effect, been theorizing these zones of exposure, exchange, and contestation as productive of religion.14 We have demonstrated how this can refer to a particular concept of religion that gets read onto peoples and histories. In this section, once again in connection with Charles Long, we argue that such dynamics can also refer more broadly to “imaginaries of matter” that emerge from and get bent back into extractive endeavors, rendering certain matter extractable and commodifiable. Again, these are activities that are best understood through the extractive zone, as “spillover” effects of extractivism, and not conflated with the term itself. Into this space, we argue that “imaginaries of matter” is a useful and illuminating concept and method from religious studies that can help to analyze extractive zones in particular.

Attention to cultural or collective imaginaries gained momentum in the latter part of the 20th century as strategic ways to conceptualize and analyze socially shared assumptions, values, and narratives (Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1996; C. Taylor 2007). Some of these approaches theorized modes of perception and engagement with environments shaped through literary or other cultural forms. Edward Said, for example, theorizes “imagined geographies” in the scope of Orientalism, referring to how spaces have been constructed through colonial and Orientalizing discourses, texts, and images (Said 1979). Conversely, in theorizing the “environmental imagination”, Lawrence Buell emphasized that other-than-human environments—their biological, geographic, geological, and ecological surroundings—shape a literary writer’s visionary scope (Buell 1995).15

Crucially, “imaginary” is being theorized by these thinkers as something shared or collective rather than the property of an individual. In this sense, rather than false, unfactual, or “made up”, collective imaginaries are taken as productive of worlds. As such, the notion of “imaginaries” has proven particularly useful for theorizing religion—especially phenomena that resist a religion/secular divide. Religious imaginaries can inform how one understands the self in relation to human and nonhuman others and entities. Religious imaginaries give rise to, or are shaped in turn by, configurations or construals of one’s place in the world. To call these construals religious does not mean that imaginaries are restricted to religion in an institutional sense. They may well be expressed, for example, through scientific and technological practices, and the affects that accompany these practices (Sideris 2017). As religion scholar Timothy Stacey and development economist Lori Beaman argue, “the power of the term imaginary … lies in its ability to traverse distinctions between religious and nonreligious ways of understanding the world while avoiding thinking of either as unified systems” (Beaman and Stacey 2021, p. 4). Even in ostensibly secular settings like extractive zones, religious imaginaries give rise to forms of thinking and interacting with objects, matter, and technologies that bring some worlds into existence and preclude others. Rather than compete with science and technology, religious imaginaries often overlap with and complement them, while practices in science and technology can give rise to their own kinds of religious imaginaries (Storm 2017).16

Imaginaries are partially conveyed through what Stacey terms “religious repertoires”; that is, reliance on images, symbols, stories, and rituals that shape how the human is understood in relation to the wider world and other creatures. Religious repertoires are bound up with meaning- and mythmaking. Less totalizing and more dynamic than the concept of worldviews, these imaginaries form a loose constellation of stories, events, and characters (including those that derive from fictional contexts) that remain in flux and together influence how one acts meaningfully in the world and what one imagines to be possible. In addition, as Stacey emphasizes, while worldviews tend to emphasize cognitive and linguistic features of world-making, imaginaries do not prioritize purely mental phenomena, but attend to embodied, affective orientations, experiences, and material practices. In short, from this perspective, religious imaginaries give multi-dimensional (not just cognitive-linguistic) shape to the kinds of worlds we bring into existence. They are performed in responsiveness to their environments as much as they are conceptualized. As such, imaginaries have considerable power to shape perceptions of possibility and desirability. Especially given the irreversibility of extractivism, extractive imaginaries thus lock in or lock out particular “socio-ecological futures” (Stacey 2023).

Several scholars have identified features of extractive imaginaries. As Gómez-Barris indicates, an extractive imagination of matter begins with rendering people and places as “extractable” and thus “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation” (5). Similarly, Gisa Weszkalnys shows how “since its inception, petroleum exploration has combined the bold assessments of oilmen with the speculative fantasies of urban financiers and the hypothetical inferences of a new breed of geoscientists in what an oil executive of the time called ‘the gamble of drilling for oil” (Weszkalnys 2015, p. 617). These “speculative fantasies” are modes of extractive imaginaries that assume natural entities—minerals, animals, ecosystems, genetic material, and more—are extricable from their contexts, relationships, and histories, and that such entities are amenable to being repurposed as instruments for other (often economic) ends. Amplifying the work of Madeline Whetung, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, “from the perspective of capitalism and the colonialism that fuels it, … zones of abundance are therefore territories rich in resources and capital” (Simpson 2025, p. 68). Similarly, in an interview with Simpson, Naomi Klein emphasizes that extractivism needs to be understood broadly as “an approach to nature, to ideas, to people”—to which Simpson adds that extraction “is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts on the other living things in that environment” (Klein and Simpson 2013). Extractive imaginaries are also often accompanied by both pragmatic and affective dimensions of an assumed entitlement to taking with consent or care. This can be predicated upon assumptions of property rights, which (in the United States and other settler colonial states) were historically “cemented in law through the appropriation of Native American lands and the subsequent enslavement of Africans” (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. xix). As Simpson describes, even in the space of one generation “there has been an intensification of racial capitalism and its hierarchies, violences that see Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples as sacrificial in order to maintain the wealth of a few elite[s]” (Simpson 2025, pp. 43–44). These extractive imaginaries can even posture that colonialism is a historical artifact and refuse to recognize its ongoing deep structure and set of definitional concepts and rights claims that continue to condition relationships. They are often heavily endorsed by people and institutions that stand to benefit from those processes directly or who derive value from proximity to certain forms of political and economic power. In the present day, these extractive imaginaries may direct attention toward economic efficiency, green technology, and ecomodern potentiality under the rhetoric of averting perils at a planetary scale, but rarely are they attuned to the local costs that extractivism poses or extractive zones carry. Extractive imaginaries of this sort operate in a predictive mode that is facilitated by a reliance on techno-scientific and economic models—themselves forms of imaginaries—that generally prescind from or minimize engagement with the sites where extraction happens and ignore how extractive zones determine ecosocial realities and meaning-making practices of acceptance, resistance, or reframing. This sort of extractive imagination presents as objective directional progress, pragmatic and trustworthy in order to fund and maintain the stratified, consumptive lifestyles deemed desirable and necessary for a particular kind of social and political order. Yet these too are affective commitments with a specific teleology. Too often these models are resistant to critique and engagement with the humanities and social sciences. Viewing them as imaginaries, as we do in this Special Issue, makes the point that they are neither inevitable nor necessarily desirable, when the frames of analysis are shifted.

We have demonstrated the facility of imaginaries of matter for focused attention on embodied, material, and affective as well as cognitive modes of collective value production. Therefore, we suggest that it provides a promising framework for studying religion in extractive zones in particular. Indeed, recent scholarship seems to be trending this way. For example, J. Kameron Carter takes up imaginaries of extraction as modes of, or dependent on, religious imaginaries—drawing from Long and in conversation with Black feminists like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Denise Ferreira da Silva, who help Carter theorize the imbrications of modern religion and anti-black imaginaries imposed on Black bodies and matter rendered extractable and commodifiable for the production of surplus value (Carter 2023).17 These analyses resonate with what Rowe has identified as the modern extractive imaginary that was informed both by new technologies of extraction in the 16th century and the transshipment of African humans to the Americas, “a secularized theology of divine exceptionalism and an interconnected idealization of external force” (Rowe 2023a, p. 66).

3.3. Religion and Secularism in Extractive Zones

In addition to its facility for focused attention on value production and collective orientation, imaginaries of matter also offer key strategies for dealing with perceived divides between the religious and the secular. In fields such as postsecular/secularization studies, critical religion and science, political theology, and post- and decolonial approaches to the study of religion, scholars contest entrenched and assumed divides between secular and religious spheres (Bray 2019; Marovich 2022; Singh 2018; Storm 2017; Yountae 2024). In these discourses, broadly accepted narratives of secularization or combative conflict between “spheres” of life (public vs. private, religious vs. secular, religion vs. science) have been problematized. Economic, colonial, and industrial discourses have been shown to continue religious logics in a newly secularized form: to produce secularity through (rather than eradicate) religious values or logics; to pursue secularization for purposes of colonial and imperial goals rather than as an enlightened freedom from religion; to trace scientific–economic pursuits as they piggyback on religion; to extend the boundaries of what counts as religion through “secular” economic, scientific, colonial, industrial pursuits; and to racialize peoples who cannot or will not secularize.

An important recent work stands out for its explicit engagement with histories of religion, secularization, and extraction. Mohamed Amer Meziane, in States of the Earth, aims to address an under-theorized ecological critique from within analyses of colonialism (Meziane 2024). Unlike most other post-secular discourses, Meziane explicitly theorizes extraction in the scope of religious/secular divides, placing the story of secularism squarely in the scope of what he identifies as “imperiality”: the continuing influence of imperialism through colonialism, capitalism, and modern state violence even after the age of empire is said to have ended.

Meziane contests the typical definition of secularism as the decline of the religious along with the correlative narrative suggesting that the West secularized itself while non-Western worlds (Judaism, Islam, African, and Indigenous traditions in particular) have resisted secularization. By contrast, Meziane argues “It was neither the progressive de-Christianization of Europe nor the persistence of Christianity that brought our world into being. This false alternative prevents us from understanding how secularization developed from the colonial mutations of empire” (p. 255). For Meziane, secularism does not refer to the decline of religion, the “death of God”, or even the continuation of Christianity under the guise of the secular. Instead, Meziane tracks secularism as “a set of genuinely real orders” (p. 2), whereby colonizing empires faced the failure of religiously converting “natives” by turning to civilizing missions under the sign of the secular—in essence to make heaven on earth through modernizing and industrializing reforms.18

Specifically in his theorization of the imbrications of religion/secularity, imperialism, capitalism, and extraction, Meziane’s work aligns with the critical approach to religion taken in this Special Issue. He concludes that if “[r]eligion is a European concept that does not refer to any universal essence, any anthropological reality that could be observed in every society” and “[i]f nothing is ‘religious’ in itself, then, the boundaries of what is religious and what is not must themselves be seen as political decisions and effects of the exercise of sovereign power” (p. 9). The generative value of this approach is in how it facilitates a focus on how these distinctions and divisions are produced, rather than on whether they are religious or secular on given definitions. What we have previously named religious imaginaries (of matter, bodies, space, and value) are negotiated—often violently through imperial, colonial and racial capitalist projects, even as they can also be seen in strategic forms of resistance in local communities combating the violence of extractivism.

There are other relevant approaches that bring focused attention to religious and secularizing dynamics of corporations and industries. One such approach is in the theorization of “industrial religion”. While we stand with Gudynas’ resistance to the nomenclature of “extractive industry”, we can nonetheless take methodological cues from the way “industrial religion” has theorized the relation of religion and secularity for analyzing spillover effects rippling through extractive zones. Industrial religion, Callahan, Lofton, and Seales argue, is a “discourse that attributes superhuman power to raw materials and the mechanical technologies employed to convert those materials into consumer goods” (Callahan et al. 2010, p. 3). As with other seemingly oppositional realms like religion and science or politics and religion, most modern perspectives approach religion and industry as mutually exclusive with the assumption that industry, like science, “demanded the excision of religion in the name of progress” (ibid., p. 2). Industrial religion contests those claims and is theorized as emerging at the productive nexus of industry and religion. “Industry”, they explain, “did not just provide funding sources for religion, and religion did not just supply affirmations for industry. Together, their institutional structures codified and conveyed a set of practices to engage the new world orders they sought to propagate” (ibid., p. 3). Such approaches focusing on the productive rather than exclusionary dynamics of religion and coloniality, imperiality, science, industry, and capital accumulation resonate with the aforementioned approaches of political theology and secularization studies more broadly, offering particularly salient methods and insights for analyzing religion in extractive zones.

4. Resisting Extractive Imaginaries, Tending to Solidarities

In the context of modern extraction, as we have emphasized, imaginaries may give rise to distinctive theologies and an entire ethos of exploitation, domination, and commodification of nature and humans. Such an ethos is constructed upon a particular understanding of humans’ relations to land (or lack thereof), and a particular understanding of power—namely, an attitude toward nature that legitimizes taking without giving, removing without consent or concern for broader social and ecological impacts (Kimmerer 2024). Extractive imaginaries are particularly pernicious for life on earth. And yet, given that imaginaries depend on particular understandings of time, space, and relations, alternative visions and counter-imaginaries are also possible. Just as imaginaries do not necessarily refer to non-factual fabulations, as certain theorists make clear, they also do not necessarily reside purely within human spheres of consciousness and culture. While some articulations of imaginaries emphasize particular reference to human consciousness and individual selfhood, others, like that of water philosopher Irene Klaver who presents a Merleau-Ponty-influenced version of the environmental imagination, emphasize a kind of imaginary that is “not simply located in the [human] individual, neither in the environment, but…arises out of the interplay between the two” (Klaver 2015, p. 50). Such interplay might be theorized as something of a contact zone (as scholars such as Donna Haraway have done (Haraway 2007, p. 244)), which expands beyond human transcultural interaction to also encompass interspecies interaction as well as geological and mineralogical responsiveness.

This point is important for illuminating often overlooked dynamics of extractive imaginaries that bleed from the mineralogical to the creaturely and engender racializations. Just as extractable minerals have been theorized as matter in need of refinement through human instrumentalization, bringing them to their “higher, true” purpose, so too enslaved Indigenous and African populations have been theorized as imperfect matter in need of the “refinements” offered by enslavement and master rule (Bentancor 2017; Yusoff 2018; Jackson 2020). In this sense, religious–economic–imperial imaginaries of matter spill over from the mineralogical to the racial.

Imaginaries of mineralogical value have informed racialization. Yet attending to creaturely and multispecies relations in extractive zones can provide counter-perspectives and alternative imaginaries that generate different forms of ethical, relational futures. Foregrounding interspecies interrelationality by expanding the contact zone beyond human-to-human social religions thus emerges as an important starting point for counter-extractive imaginaries. Gómez-Barris emphasizes that mineralogical and geological features are often foregrounded in the theorization of extractive zones, which are themselves often locales of high biodiversity and thus multispecies/multi-being relationalities. The language of “becomings” in multispecies analyses names a form of relationship that emerges from “nonhierarchical alliances, symbiotic attachments, and the mingling of creative agents” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). Becoming, Donna Haraway stresses, is always “becoming with in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” (Haraway 2007, p. 244). A focus on becoming shifts attention away from discrete objects or “things” to actions and interactions, or as Karen Barad puts it, “intra-action” or “phenomena-in-their-becoming”, emphasizing human responsibility within a world that is also continually worlding itself (Barad 2011). In multispecies approaches, scholars look to the dynamics of contact zones as natureculture, where encounters between humans and other species coproduce new ecological, social, and political arrangements.

While much of the recent scholarship in a multispecies vein focuses on human interactions with living creatures, including some that might previously have been seen as “bare life”—organisms dismissed as mere backdrop to human existence, often framed as eminently killable, especially in Euro-American iterations (Agamben 1998)—contemporary research on extractivism in oil cultures, for example, understands petroleum, coal, and other energy sources not as dead or merely instrumental but as matter that calls for responsiveness and responsibility (Rowe 2023b). Zoe Todd, for example, reflects on vulnerability of fish kin in rivers where “weaponized oil kin” has been spilled by industry (Todd 2017). In Todd’s vision of kinship, matter is not passively waiting for human action, nor is it acting of its own accord and so freeing or obscuring human responsibility. Rather, as Todd emphasizes in reference to oil-kin and Barad emphasizes with regard to intra-active matter, these entanglements call for responsive relation and accountability.

There has been a notable turn to such cultural, ethical, and literary–artistic visions of possible alternative futures, at times in explicit engagement with discourses of religion. Gómez-Barris, for example, foregrounds “submerged perspectives” and active decolonial movements within extractive zones, while highlighting problems of epistemological extraction and religious appropriation in “Andean Phenomenology and New Age Settler Colonialism” (Gómez-Barris 2017a). Indigenous actions and activism in extractive zones are the focus of the volume co-edited by anthropologists Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America (Ødegaard and Andía 2019). This text offers ten ethnographic studies “of those world- and life-making projects that are currently being formulated by South American Indigenous actors in response to ongoing politics of extractivism” (2019). On Turtle Island, several studies highlight the ceremony-infused activism of Indigenous Americans protecting water and land from extractive projects (Alook et al. 2023; Estes 2019; Estes and Dhillon 2019; Redness 2021; Simpson 2021, 2025), while Winona LaDuke has long highlighted the politics of religious recognition. Given the ways US legal code has been influenced primary by Protestant and monotheistic concepts of religion, many Indigenous counter-extractive imaginaries rooted in sacred sites marked for extractivism are not legally recognized as religious and therefore are not constitutionally protected (LaDuke 2016). Philosopher of religion and Black radicalism J. Kameron Carter argues that many voices within the Black feminist and radical traditions communicate modes of resistance in esthetics and alternative cosmologies that can be identified as modes of Black religion posed as resistant to the anti-black extractive histories of modern religion (Carter 2023). Often, what is being asserted then, is not just alternate futures, but alternate imaginaries of matter that therefore could be seen as counter-extractive modes of religion.

Toward Reflexive Extractivist Religious Studies

In foregrounding the embeddedness of religious studies in historical and ongoing extractivism—even as counter-extractivist movements and voices also find religious footing within extractive zones—we are making the case for what might be called reflexive extractivist religious studies. Here, we are thinking with and adapting Carolyn Fornoff’s articulation of “reflexive extractivist aesthetics”, in which artists—Fritz Irízar, Débora Delmar, and Minerva Cuevas—pose counter- and anti-extractivisms while recognizing their own enmeshment in networks, systems, and institutions of extraction. Fornoff argues that their works call “attention to the entanglement of art and extractivism” by engaging “the contradictions inherent in making anti-extractivist art within institutional and sociopolitical contexts circumscribed by extractive capitalism” (p. 38). Such work demands self-reflexivity that calls attention to its “financing, institutional structuring, or participation otherwise in the circuits of commodities and capital it seeks to illuminate or diagnose” (p. 38). The focus here is not on individual culpability but rather on institutional and systemic embeddedness as they structure the conditions of expression. Rather than posit an esthetics of exteriority or purity and ethical transcendence, their reflexivity acknowledges the enormity and saturation of extractivism in their disciplines. Is such an approach liable to bend toward cynicism? Fornoff acknowledges that, in the end, “these works of extractivist reflexivity do not proffer solutions” but instead prioritize an unblinking accounting of the complex imbrication of art and extractivism that does not abide cursory analyses and facile solutions (p. 63). However, Fornoff argues that grappling with such conditions is essential for these artists, since “it is only by fully reckoning with the way in which extractivism is intertwined with the infrastructures of art, and how art in turn has contributed to the naturalization of extractivist logics, that we can begin to reassess how the system might be reconfigured” (p. 63).

Amplifying this insight, we aim in this Special Issue to call for a reflexive extractivist religious studies. Toward that goal, the preceding sections have suggested particular frameworks, methods, discourses, and figures that fellow scholars and scholar–activists might think and act with. In addition, a truly reflexive extractivist shift would entail analysis of the full span of scholarly activities, from generating research questions to knowledge production and dissemination of knowledge in publishing and action. Given the way that the study of religion has historically and often still functions in a mode of epistemological extraction in historical and current extractive zones—and considering the way US-based universities historically and currently depend on extraction from appropriated land19—we find it especially important that we address ongoing imbrications of extraction and knowledge production. Specifically, in this section, we foreground extractivism’s ripple effects in the extractive zones of scholarly research and publication.

As tenured white cis-gender settler scholars in two land-grant universities and one private, Jesuit university (with its endemic relations to the Catholic Church’s major role in colonialism, including, but not limited to, its manifold land expropriation as well as abusive educational missions), we also want to urge reflexive awareness to our fellow scholars formed by the practices of the colonial, racialized academy and highlight historic tendencies for Indigenous and Black imaginaries to be repurposed or recolonized for settler goals (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, p. x; see also La Paperson 2017; Tuck and Yang 2012). Such practices have manifested in a sense of entitlement to cultural stories as a source of ethical material, “parachute science”, as well as the bioappropriation and biocolonialism of the natural world and human genetic and bodily material (see TallBear 2013, 2017; Shiva 1997). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith diagnosed decades ago

The arguments of different indigenous peoples based on spiritual relationships to the universe, to the landscape and to stones, rocks, insects, and other things, seen and unseen, have been difficult arguments for Western systems of knowledge to deal with or accept. These arguments give a partial indication of the different world views and alternative ways of coming to know, and of being, which still endure … Concepts of spirituality which Christianity attempted to destroy, then to appropriate, and then to claim, are critical sites of resistance for indigenous peoples. The values, attitudes, concepts and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality represent, in many cases, the clearest contrast and mark of difference between indigenous peoples and the West. It is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand and cannot control … yet.

(L. T. Smith [1999] 2012, p. 78)

Specifically, we want to insist that the discourses, identities, artistic creations, cultural creativities, and legacies of historically colonized, decimated, or oppressed populations are not material for scholars formed in dominant Euro-American mindsets to extract for research purposes in contemporary academic settings. Such counter-, oppressed, and minoritized religions and lifeways are not resources to be mined for environmental “solutions” (see Simpson 2025). Neither are marginalized and colonized peoples required to partner with settler academics for the purposes of those academics’ own (merely) mental decolonization or ethical expansion. We find it imperative to assess our positionalities accordingly, and discern in each case what modes of relationality are possible without creating our own forms of extractive zones. Recognizing our emplacement in settler colonial geographies and institutions, we lift up the insights of decolonial scholars but do not claim that mantle for ourselves; cognizant that “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012), following Max Liboiron, we recognize our work as anticolonial (Liboiron 2021, pp. 132–33).

Such approaches call for working in solidarity with decolonial visions, without exploiting them to fund settler scholars’ or various disciplines’ turn to imagine more ethical futures. What Liboiron has indicated with regard to environmental science research, we endorse with regard to social scientific and humanities research: “there are a variety of ways to do anticolonial [research and scholarship] without essentialization or appropriation of Indigenous knowledges” (Liboiron 2021, p. 125). We salute the courage and vision of scholars and research partnerships, such as the CLEAR lab (n.d.) at Memorial University (Newfoundland), who envision and enact research as a co-creation of knowledge and truly mutual engagement for partnership and learning, and that center the self-articulations, boundaries, needs, and goals of minoritized and oppressed communities. This work can take multiple forms in the study of religion. Collaborative, collective, and community-based Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Cornish et al. 2023) methods like Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), rooted in Latin American Liberation Philosophy (Wallerstein and Duran 2008), can be effective ways to explore counter-extractive religion research. A gently burgeoning collection of literature on related goals and methods of best practices in ethnographic research is increasingly—if still rarely—attested to in the social and natural sciences (see, among others, Ballestero and Winthereik 2021; Liboiron 2021; more recently in theology, see Vigen and Scharen 2024). In this Special Issue of Religions and in our work more generally, “the call here is to give witness to alternative energies that have persisted and show up more fully in solidarity” with alternative imaginations but not claiming, “mining”, or recolonizing them (Rowe 2023a, p. 168).

Significant systemic, institutional obstacles pose particular challenges for encouraging these modes of scholarship. Approaches to the co-creation of knowledge and restorative justice are rarely and uneasily aligned with the productivity requirements and institutional habits of knowledge generation conditioned by contemporary Euro-American university cultures and structures of promotion, advancement, and job security in educational systems increasingly oriented toward neoliberal goals and employment precocity for educators. This kind of scholarship will not be sustainable unless it is accompanied by institutional and systemic changes to university policy and mission. With the now-ubiquitous casualization of labor in academic instruction, the decline of tenured professorships and academic employment with full-time salary and benefits is giving way to part-time, short-term labor contracts that create cycles of dependency and precarity among college instructors. This is a massive, ongoing problem of labor exploitation in academia.

Simultaneously, shifts related to the profitability of academic publishing have led to limitations on access to scholarly materials, particularly for contract instructors, independent scholars, and scholar–activists who are not able to log into a university library for certain journals and books; the fees to purchase books and articles can be prohibitive. For authors who want to ensure that their published materials are open access, there are often sizeable and often prohibitive fees assigned by the publication platform. Institutional subventions or independent wealth are two main options for paying those fees. Both are uncommon, thus intensifying existing inequalities and also individualizing responsibility rather than addressing the systemic issue.

For scholars who have the privilege of tenure-line jobs (and thus institutional access to scholarly materials) and whose job security or advancement depends on scholarly publication, another ripple emerges. There remains considerable pressure to produce publications in peer-reviewed journals or presses over intervals of time (intervals that have drastically decreased in the space of a generation). Into this context, a “pay-to-publish” economy has arisen, which scholars have identified as predatory publishing practices. In these models, journals accept research papers for relatively rapid publication, for a substantial fee and often with limited or non-existent peer review (Wilson 2024; Oviedo-García 2021; Grudniewicz et al. 2019). The problem has been particularly acute and well attested in the sciences, though scholars of journalism and mass communication have also documented the phenomenon (Freedman and Kurambayev 2022). As Oviedo-García (2021) summarized

Predatory journals are a global threat to science (Harvey and Weinstein 2017; Grudniewicz et al. 2019; Strong 2019), because they undermine its integrity (Vogel 2017; Abad-García 2019), its quality, and its credibility (Pond et al. 2019). They are, in all, a threat to society as a whole, because whenever the articles that they publish are indexed in selective databases, which is the case of PubMed, ‘the items achieve global exposure and are interpreted by readers, including patients, as trustworthy’ (Manca et al. 2019), with those articles likely not to have undergone an acceptable editorial and peer-review process.

Among the contested publishers of scientific journals has been Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), a publisher with several hundred journals that not only covers the sciences but also the social sciences and humanities. Notably, for our purposes, MDPI is also the publisher of Religions, where this Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones is published. Each of us has been sought out by interlocutors and concerned colleagues who wondered whether Religions, as an MDPI journal, is an appropriate venue in which to publish such a collection. Generally, the concern has been stated as one about academic ethics. Again, given our aim of outlining the study of religion’s histories of epistemological extraction from within extractive zones, the ethics of where and how to publish a Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones was a topic we discussed at length from the beginning of our process.

We were hard pressed to find resources to help us think through our concerns and sometimes competing goals. Since a key goal from the beginning of envisioning this Special Issue was to create resources and conceptual footing for further scholarship on religion in extractive zones, we would like to conclude by posing our publication process as a practice of reflexivity, informed by the “reflexive extractivist” scholarship mode described above. Our hope is that our descriptions of process and judgments in religion scholarship can spur further conversations about extractive zones in terms of both the epistemological extraction of knowledge production and also regarding the distribution of that knowledge. Here, then, is a synopsis of our methods and analysis.

The Principle of Accountable and Generative Peer Review. We uphold the importance of high calibers of peer review that, at best, reflect the highest standards for scholarly discourse. We also add that at its best, peer review exhibits not just clarity but also generosity of critically constructive feedback; encourages accountability to broader communities; and can also be a mode of knowledge distribution that ensures that multiple, nuanced perspectives are represented.20

The Principle of Authorial Accessibility. We anticipated and took strides to include voices and perspectives from scholars and activists working within historical extractive zones. Given the long-lasting ecological, social, and economic exploitation that often remain legacies of an extractive zone, it was particularly important that our authors not face financial barriers that could disproportionately disadvantage scholars working or living within historical extractive zones or otherwise confronting conditions of precarity. In keeping with our commitment to supporting non-extractive practices, both theoretically and practically, we found it necessary to be proactive in ensuring that our authors would not face financial obstacles to publication in this Special Issue.21

Principle of Reader Accessibility. Producing a Special Issue that would be readily accessible to scholars and activists—often working in extractive zones with little to no institutional support for paywalls and fees to either publish or access published essays—was an ethical consideration we prioritized in our process. In our collective experience as editors and authors of individual peer-reviewed articles, there is enormous variation in what kinds of scholarly materials can reach readers. Much scholarship that could be of value for researchers and activists in extractive zones remains behind paywalls, such that readers with university affiliations whose libraries subscribe to the journal are the primary readership. In many of those cases, non-university-affiliated readers can purchase individual articles for fees that vary dramatically depending on the publication. Open access articles provide a solution here, but current financial models for academic journals tend to reinforce existing inequalities in academia. Individual authors of the articles can pay to have the article made open access, such that any reader can access it on the internet. This option tends to be priced above USD 1000 per essay and sometimes several thousand dollars, a prohibitive fee for most researchers in the humanities, especially those who lack institutional subventions for such fees. The problem is amplified when authors work in contingent labor situations inside or outside of academe. With this approach, elite journals avoid taking on the cost of open access publication themselves and instead externalize the cost of open-access publishing onto individual researchers.

We do, of course, salute the editorial boards and scholarly journals that work to make all of their journal issues accessible at no cost to international readerships and non-subscribers, either through collective advocacy by editorial teams, institutional subventions from wealthy or ethically attuned universities, or grants by appropriate foundations (examples of such journals include Media+Environment and ACME: A Journal of Critical Geography). The available offerings of religion journals (and religion journals that cover religion and environmental issues in particular) with a potential for wide, global readership in an open access format, however, remain severely limited.

There are additional topics worthy of analysis and debate in the study of religion as well as other fields. We hope this conversation about open-access publication continues robustly in the scholarly fields of religion, the environmental humanities, and beyond and leads to ongoing, expanded access for readers.22 We also acknowledge that a major ethical consideration, untheorized here as it is beyond the scope of this project, is the contemporary reality of data aggregation and artificial intelligence.23

In all of these ways and more to come, the dynamics of extractive zones and the practices of knowledge production continue to be enmeshed. This Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones represents our endeavor to practice reflexivity and work constructively in contexts of endemic ethical quandary. In making the case for extractive zones as contact zones where concepts employed by theorists and scholar/activist/practitioners have and continue to produce modes of religion to legitimize or contest extractivism as imaginaries of matter, we have aimed to provide enticing perspectives and useful tools as an invitation for future scholarship. As scholars increasingly pursue community-engaged, restorative justice projects, we submit that analyzing religion from contact/extractive/sacrifice zones and rigorously attending to the play of religious/secular imaginaries therein can provide key insights and modes of analysis that will only increasingly be imperative in the wake of ever-expanding extractive zones and overall scholarship in religious studies.