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Religion in Extractive Zones
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Religion in Extractive Zones

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 July 2024) | Viewed by 11456

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Terra Schwerin Rowe

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Guest Editor
Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5017, USA
Interests: petrocultures, energy humanities, and religion; religious responses to climate change; extractivism and religion; intersectional ecofeminisms; critical new materialisms; gender, race, and religion; religion science; religion and ecology
Prof. Dr. Lisa Sideris

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Guest Editor
Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4160, USA
Interests: environmental ethics; religion and nature; environmental humanities; science and religion
Dr. Christiana Zenner

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Theology, Fordham University, New York, NY 10023, USA
Interests: fresh water values and ethics; religious ecological ethics at the intersection of ecological theory and developments in the earth sciences; anti-colonial ecofeminism, Laudato Si’, and the ecological turn in Catholic social teaching; feminist science studies and comparative religious responses to Darwin and evolutionary theory

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Religion proliferates in extractive zones. Minerals and petrochemicals are hoped for (Asmussen 2016), conjured (Tsing 2005), and narrated as redemptive (Dochuk 2019, Rowe 2022, Grau 2023). Magic (Petrocultures Research Group 2016, Wenzel 2006, Coronil 1997) and alchemy (Han forthcoming) are evoked. Race is constructed through religious discourse surrounding the “proper management” of extracted matter (Smith 2022) and new religions assemble around counter-extractive modes of relation (Rivera 2021, Wynter 1962), while persisting lifeways resist human, mineralogical, and transnational petrochemical extraction (Estes & Dhillon 2019, Serje 2003, da Silva 2022). 

Even in the theorization of religion, extraction zones have played a significant but under-recognized role. The fetish, formerly theorized as a primitive form of religion, emerged as an early theory of the history of religions in West African zones of human and mineralogical extraction (Pietz 1985, Matory 2018). More recently, religion has been theorized as emerging in contact zones—contexts of intercultural exchange, conflict, and exploitation that have proven transformative for each contact culture (Long 2018a), or, relatedly, as dynamic, in flux across national and cultural boundaries and spaces (Tweed 2006). Those contact zones often turn out to be embedded in wider spheres of extraction, imbricated with coloniality and racialization. What theories of religion—religion and ecology, religion and economy, coloniality and secularization, religion and racialization—might emerge if religiously productive contact zones are identified more specifically as extractive zones (Gómez-Barris 2017)? 

The extractive zone elicits the emphasis theorists of religion have put on space/place, but should not be seen as limited to a particular geographical region. Indeed, extractivism describes the systems and practices whereby humans, data, customs, beliefs, minerals, or other “resources” are removed in high volume from a locale of constitutive relations and transported across oceans, national borders, neighborhoods, or cultures, transforming that relationally constituted matter into a commodity for the profit of an elite, exceptional few (Gudynas 2020, Tsing 2013). 

A religious surplus in extractive zones remains referenced but insufficiently analyzed among the extraction humanities and petroculture studies which have otherwise made remarkable strides in foregrounding what has been backgrounded in extractive cultures. The study of religion has much to offer in terms of methodologies and critical approaches. While the studies of religion and environment, ecotheologies, or religion and nature have predominantly focused on the preservation of green spaces, sustainability, or the conservation of resources, decolonial, postcolonial, and political theological approaches to the study of religion are examining the religious imaginaries of matter (Long 2018b, Crockett 2022, Carter 2023), the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations (An & Craig 2021, Jennings 2016) and extraction in particular (Rowe 2022).

This issue invites a more robust theorizing of religion in extractive zones. It aims for new approaches but also calls for reflection on the ways religion has already been theorized out of a backgrounded extractive zone. The questions considered might include (but need not be limited to) the following:

  • How might such an approach change religion and ecology or religion and economy discourse?
  • How might such an approach change narratives about, framings of, and responses to climate change—so often theorized as an “emissions” problem while profoundly obscuring roots in extraction?
  • What human and more-than-human modes of resistance emerge in extractive zones? What counter-extractive modes of relation assemble here and what is their proximity to the sacred? 
  • What new insights might be gained into the ways religious and scientific knowledge is drawn from methodological or material extractive zones?
  • What ethical and religious issues emerge in the extraction of human or other-than-human genetic material? 
  • How is race produced in relation to religion in extractive zones (in relation to mineralogical metaphysics (Bentancor 2017), geological histories (Yusoff 2018), or legal guardianship (in the case of the Osage and African Americans in OK))?
  • What are the gender dynamics employed in resistance to, or support of, extractivism?
  • What modes of coloniality are resisted or reinforced through religious practice in extractive zones? 

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it by 15 December 2023 to the guest editors ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ) or to the /Religions/ editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References:

Yountae, A.; Craig, E. Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality and Philosophy of Religion; Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA, 2021.

Asmussen, T. The Kux as a Site of Mediation: Economic Practices and Material Desires in the Early Modern German Mining Industry. In Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650; Burghartz, S., Burkart, L., Göttler, C., Eds.; Brill: Boston, MA, USA, 2016; pp. 159–182.

Bentancor, O. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru; University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2017.

Carter, J.K. The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song; Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA, 2023.

Coronil, F. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, USA, 1997.

Crockett, C. Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology; Columbia University Press: New York, NY, USA, 2022.

da Silva, D.F. Unpayable Debt; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 2022.

Dochuk, D. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America; Basic Books: New York, NY, USA, 2019.

Estes, N.; Dhillon, J., Eds. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement; University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2019.

Gómez-Barris, M. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives; Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA, 2017.

Grau, M. “State of Happiness”? Petroreligion and Petromelancholia in Norway. Dialog 2023, 62, 173–183.

Gudynas, E. Extractivisms: Politics, Economy, and Ecology; Fernwood Publishing: Black Point, Cananda, 2021.

Han, L.Y. Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor; University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, forthcoming, 2024.

Jennings, W.J. Binding Landscapes: Secularism, Race, and the Spatial Modern. In Race and Secularism in America. Kahn, J., Lloyd, V., Eds. Columbia University Press: New York, NY, USA, 2016; pp. 207–238.

Long, C. The Religious Implications of the Situation of Cultural Contact. In Ellipsis: The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long; Bloomsbury: New York, NY, USA, 2018; pp. 157–170.

Long, C. Mircea Eliade and the Imagination of Matter. In Ellipsis: The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long; Bloomsbury: New York, NY, USA, 2018; pp. 117–127.

Matory, J.L. The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make; Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA, 2018.

Petroculture Research Group. After Oil; West Virginia University Press: Morgantown, WV, USA, 2016.

Pietz, W. The Problem of the Fetish, I. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 1985, 9, 5–17.

Rivera, M. Embodied Counterpoetics: Sylvia Wynter on Religion and Race. In Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion; Yountae, A., Craig, E., Eds.; Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA, 2021; pp. 57–85.

Rowe, T.S. Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology. Bloomsbury: New York, NY, USA, 2022.

Serje, M. ONGs, Indios y Petróleo: El Caso U’wa a Través de los Mapas del Territorio en Disputa. Bull. De L’institut Français D’études Andin. 2003, 32, 101–131.

Smith, M. 2022. The Changing Muslim World: Biopolitics, Energy, and the Racialization of Islam in Protestant Missions. Energy, Extraction and Religion Seminar. AAR, Denver, CO, USA.

Tsing, A. Prosperity. In Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2005; pp. 21–80.

Tsing, A. Sorting out Commodities: How Capitalist Value Is Made through Gifts. HAU: J. Ethnogr. Theory 2013, 3, 21–43.

Tweed, T.A. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion; Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006.

Wenzel, J. Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature. Postcolonial Stud. 2006, 9, 449–464.

Wynter, S. Hills of Hebron; Randle: Kingston, Jamaica, 1962.

Yusoff, K. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2018.

Dr. Terra Schwerin Rowe
Prof. Dr. Lisa Sideris
Dr. Christiana Zenner
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • extractivism
  • energy humanities
  • petroculture studies
  • colonization and coloniality
  • race and religion
  • ecotheology
  • religion and ecology
  • religion and economy

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Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 289 KiB  
Article
Lay Religious Associations in Extractive Zones: A Case Study of Diamantina, Brazil
by Rebecca Janzen
Religions 2024, 15(11), 1328; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15111328 - 30 Oct 2024
Viewed by 880
Abstract
This article considers religion in extractive zones by focusing on a religious practice in an extractive zone, namely, an Afro-Brazilian Irmandade (Catholic lay religious association) devoted to Our Lady of Mercy in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It adopts approaches from history and cultural [...] Read more.
This article considers religion in extractive zones by focusing on a religious practice in an extractive zone, namely, an Afro-Brazilian Irmandade (Catholic lay religious association) devoted to Our Lady of Mercy in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It adopts approaches from history and cultural studies to examine art, architecture, archives, and material culture, and brings these methodologies into conversation with Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of contact zones, Charles Long’s connection between these zones and new religious practices, Eduardo Gudynas’ definition of extraction, and Macarena Gómez-Barris’ decolonial methodologies for approaching the study of extractive zones. This study is contextualized in the history of mining in Brazil, the connection between mining and enslavement of Africans in the Americas, and the enduring legacy of lay religious associations in Brazil. The article then examines the association’s church, focusing on its late 18th and early 19th century façade and the statues at its main altar, and its 19th and 20th century maintenance records. It suggests that the Irmandades are engaged in a unique religious practice that arises within an extractive region because of specific historical, political, and social reasons, and that they give their members a place within the existing structures even as they challenge them. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
16 pages, 265 KiB  
Article
Between Whale Teeth and the Moral Uses of the Sea: Considering Religion in the US Whaling Industry’s Extractive Zone
by Richard J. Callahan
Religions 2024, 15(11), 1296; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15111296 - 23 Oct 2024
Viewed by 917
Abstract
This article argues that the nineteenth century US whaling industry provides an oceanic perspective on extractive zones that illuminates their multi-sited, multiscalar nature where the local and global are deeply entangled. Further, I suggest that viewing this process through the underexamined lens of [...] Read more.
This article argues that the nineteenth century US whaling industry provides an oceanic perspective on extractive zones that illuminates their multi-sited, multiscalar nature where the local and global are deeply entangled. Further, I suggest that viewing this process through the underexamined lens of religion can contribute to a fuller understanding of the widespread, often neglected, impacts of extractivism. I take an 1845 sermon by liberal Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell, “A Discourse on the Moral Uses of the Sea,” read alongside the labors of the American whaling industry, as a mid-nineteenth century moment to consider the concealment of the natural resource extraction that is necessary for the production of the conditions of possibility for the imagination of “civilization” ideologically and theologically in the mid-nineteenth century. I look to the journey of whale teeth as they move between waste, items of trade in a global capitalist market, and powerful ritual objects in Fiji, assessing how the extractive zone as a contact zone also transforms religion, which in turn can be a location of agency and resistance. The article calls attention to the critical entanglements of indigenous and settler worlds, whose stories cannot be told separately from one another. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
21 pages, 285 KiB  
Article
Chartism’s Critical Carbon Theology: What Fossil Power’s Nineteenth-Century Demonizers Contribute to the Ethics of Energy Justice Today
by Ryan Juskus
Religions 2024, 15(11), 1293; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15111293 - 23 Oct 2024
Viewed by 693
Abstract
Recent scholarship on religion and energy highlights the religious attachments some groups of people form with fossil fuels that have served to facilitate their extraction and use in building socially and economically stratified worlds. This scholarship foregrounds the business owners, managers, scientists, inventors, [...] Read more.
Recent scholarship on religion and energy highlights the religious attachments some groups of people form with fossil fuels that have served to facilitate their extraction and use in building socially and economically stratified worlds. This scholarship foregrounds the business owners, managers, scientists, inventors, industrial spokespersons, and other panegyrists of the beneficent, civilizing power of coal and oil. However, little research to date has examined the religious attachments formed with fossil fuels by those who mined them, labored with machines powered by them, and lived in places that were diminished to extract, burn, and waste them. This article builds on the work of Andreas Malm and Terra Schwerin Rowe to examine these “critical carbon theologies”. It focuses in particular on the theological themes in popular literature produced by the nineteenth-century British Chartist movement—the first great social movement led by those who experienced in their bodies, communities, and environments the traumas that accompanied the introduction of fossil fuels as a motive power. These Chartist activist-theologians condemned coal power as a demonic force in history and envisioned a way to exorcize an industrializing society of its demons. This article uncovers and evaluates the largely overlooked theological dimensions of this movement and applies them toward a consideration of the ethics of energy transition today. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
11 pages, 253 KiB  
Article
Fish, Fetishization, and Faith in the Arctic Ocean
by Marion Grau and Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg
Religions 2024, 15(11), 1292; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15111292 - 23 Oct 2024
Viewed by 1011
Abstract
The ocean is a site of energy, space, movement, depth, and extraction. The biblical creation account begins there, with the energy of movement of the Spirit over the Deep. The exploitation of the ocean can be read as a desecration of the Deep, [...] Read more.
The ocean is a site of energy, space, movement, depth, and extraction. The biblical creation account begins there, with the energy of movement of the Spirit over the Deep. The exploitation of the ocean can be read as a desecration of the Deep, of divine presence and creativity, where beings of the deep roam. Many of these beings are beyond human knowledge, known only to the Creator. Many disturbances of the ocean floor and ocean dwellers have already occurred; penetrating even deeper into the ocean is a form of sacrilege. Extractive politics in the Arctic Ocean and in Northern Sápmi continue following decades of overfishing, poaching, and repression of indigenous coastal traditions. The Sámi tradition and ecological theologies offer a different way of looking at coastal and ocean regions. As tools to counter the calls for endless extraction, we offer narratives that highlight the importance of the coastal Sámi oral tradition and a decolonial ecotheology of a protective apophasis of the Deep. Countering extraction involves rejecting a hermeneutics of commodity fetish that distorts the ocean and those that live and travel within it by framing them as endlessly extractable. This article seeks to resist the extraction of oceanic waters and remind us of ways to respect ocean-dwelling species, the ocean, and ourselves in a time where we are facing the sixth great extinction. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
23 pages, 35915 KiB  
Article
Patron Saints of Meat and Tallow: Sacralizing Extractivism in the Colonial Cattle Industry of Yucatán, Mexico
by Chelsea Fisher
Religions 2024, 15(11), 1291; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15111291 - 23 Oct 2024
Viewed by 645
Abstract
In colonial Yucatán, Mexico, the owners of plantation-like estates known as haciendas conscripted saints and cows to expropriate land from Indigenous Maya farming communities. In this paper, I trace the role of hacienda saints by framing them as an introduced or adventive species, [...] Read more.
In colonial Yucatán, Mexico, the owners of plantation-like estates known as haciendas conscripted saints and cows to expropriate land from Indigenous Maya farming communities. In this paper, I trace the role of hacienda saints by framing them as an introduced or adventive species, capable of forming both mutualistic and invasive interspecies relationships in their new habitat. I examine the introduction of saints to the region by Franciscans, early attempts by Maya people to build anticolonial coalitions with saints and cows, the participation of hacienda saints in extractivist ranching practices, and the ultimate reclaiming and possible naturalization of saints by Maya rebels. This paper extends conceptualizations of the plantation—as both a site of species extinction and a site of interspecies collaboration—to include Catholic saints, so as to interrogate the dynamic role of supernatural entities in deep and ongoing histories of extractivism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
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16 pages, 1265 KiB  
Article
The Changing Muslim World: Energy, Extraction, and the Racialization of Islam in Protestant Missions
by Matthew J. Smith
Religions 2024, 15(10), 1262; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101262 - 16 Oct 2024
Viewed by 840
Abstract
This essay examines the role of Anglo Protestant missions in the Persian Gulf in racializing “the Moslem world” for the emergent white world order at the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, I consider the way Protestant missionaries extracted knowledge about Islam, [...] Read more.
This essay examines the role of Anglo Protestant missions in the Persian Gulf in racializing “the Moslem world” for the emergent white world order at the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, I consider the way Protestant missionaries extracted knowledge about Islam, racializing “the Moslem world” as a civilizational “unit” devoid of energetic life—and therefore incompatible with the modern world—even as they simultaneously mediated the rise of oil extraction along the Persian Gulf in that same period. Extraction was not only evident in the material relations of empire, but also in the way Protestant missionary discourse shaped “the Muslim world” into a racial unit in need of management and optimization. I consider two energetic grammars used by Protestant missionaries to signify the changes occurring in “the Moslem World”, namely, Samuel Zwemer’s use of “disintegration” and Basil Mathews use of “ferment”. I argue that it was in these material and discursive entanglements of oil extraction where knowledge about Islam became an important tool of European colonial governance, and where energetic grammars of religion became critical to the biopolitical production and management of racialized Muslim populations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
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20 pages, 317 KiB  
Article
Religion, Extraction, and Just Transition in Appalachia
by Joseph D. Witt
Religions 2024, 15(10), 1261; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101261 - 16 Oct 2024
Viewed by 639
Abstract
This paper employs approaches from religious studies and Appalachian studies to examine the history, influence, and future of a multifaceted ethos of extraction, particularly as it influences the coal industry, in the Appalachian region of the United States. While many studies of extraction [...] Read more.
This paper employs approaches from religious studies and Appalachian studies to examine the history, influence, and future of a multifaceted ethos of extraction, particularly as it influences the coal industry, in the Appalachian region of the United States. While many studies of extraction and the coal industry focus on their economic and political dimensions, by examining a broader ethos of extraction, this paper highlights multiple religious influences, including the entanglements between religious communities and extraction-based industries, the powerful moral narratives that serve to interpret and justify extraction, and the dynamics involved in shaping local identities and perceptions of place that enable this ethos to influence post-coal transition efforts. The result is a broad survey of the influences and impacts of resource extraction in Appalachia that challenges many of the longstanding stereotypes that can still be commonly found deployed about the region. In examining these influences, the paper also describes how academic interpreters have helped to shape popular conceptions of the Appalachian region that ultimately support ongoing extractive practices. Building upon insights from grassroots, anti-extractive activist communities in the region, the paper concludes by suggesting some ways that academics might adopt restorative ethics and practices in their work to address the entanglements between extractive scholarship and exploitation and devise alternative paths for just futures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
23 pages, 533 KiB  
Article
Taking Alberta Back: Faith, Fuel, and Freedom on the Canadian Far Right
by Jacob McLean, Emily Laxer and Efe Peker
Religions 2024, 15(10), 1250; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101250 - 15 Oct 2024
Viewed by 1591
Abstract
Alberta, Canada is both a major extractive zone—home to the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, mostly in the form of oil sands located in the north of the province—and a place whose political culture has been profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity. [...] Read more.
Alberta, Canada is both a major extractive zone—home to the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, mostly in the form of oil sands located in the north of the province—and a place whose political culture has been profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity. It is both “petro province” and “God’s province”. Despite these distinct political economic and socio-cultural features, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the contemporary relationships among them. To explore this, we profile the populist far-right social movement organization Take Back Alberta (TBA), which, by channeling the interlocking “freedom” and separatist movements into the governing United Conservative Party (UCP), played a pivotal role in Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s rise to power. We ask the following question: what role do religion and a populist defense of the fossil fuel industry (or “extractive populism”) play, both ideologically and organizationally, within TBA? Drawing from TBA-related documents, including websites, podcasts, social media, and speeches, our analysis produces two key findings: first, that TBA deploys a radical, far-right version of extractive populism, which “anchors” the Danielle Smith government, and, second, that evangelical Christianity contributes to this extractive populism organizationally—by impacting TBA’s membership and resource infrastructure—and discursively, by influencing the collective action frames utilized by TBA leaders in advocating for the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
13 pages, 236 KiB  
Article
Extraction, Exploitation, and Religious Surplus in the Capitalocene
by Joerg Rieger
Religions 2024, 15(10), 1233; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101233 - 11 Oct 2024
Viewed by 1921
Abstract
Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, [...] Read more.
Efforts to address the logic of extraction, which arguably is at the core of our current environmental catastrophe, are examples for a non-reductive material turn in the study of religion and theology. These efforts are linked with the logics of property, possession, human/nature, and human/land relations. This emphasis on materiality and relationship creates welcome openings for another set of relationships that is still under-reflected in the material turn in religion and theology, namely the various connections between extraction and exploitation, specifically of labor, both productive and reproductive, human and other-than-human. In this article, the logic of extraction will be interpreted and reevaluated in its relation to exploitative relationships of labor, which in turn will be deepened in conversation with extraction. Relationships of extraction, production, and reproduction will further be investigated in terms of the notion of a religious surplus, which examines the multiple contributions of religion and theology as generated in broader surplus-producing relationships. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion in Extractive Zones)
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