The project analyzes the cosmovisions, ontologies, and epistemologies of pre-colonial and contemporary Mesoamerican and North American Indigenous peoples. Of particular interest are concepts of the human person placed in a net of relationships with nonhuman persons such as animals, stones, mountains, stars, ancestors, spirits, and deities.
The project adopts an aesthetics of religion-approach, inspired by the material turn, visual turn, and body turn in the study of religions. Consequently, the project’s source materials are not only propositional statements in written texts or verbal statements but also embodied and material forms of human communication as well as ritual action and everyday practice. In working with these kinds of materials, the boundaries of the methodologies of Western academic research and the heuristic value of Western concepts such as religion, spirituality, art, and writing as well as nature and transcendence to understand American Indigenous ontologies are constantly challenged.
At the heart of the project lies a meta level of reflexivity tracing the diverse ontological and epistemological positions debated in the research fields of the new animism and the ontological turn. These fields are characterized by an increasing diversification of positions, with agents from different ethnic, religious, and academic backgrounds, sharing insider and outsider positions, and debating the role of normativity and socio-political engagement in Western science and academic research. Inspired by a postcolonial perspective, the project listens to Indigenous voices in an academic discourse shaped by asymmetrical power relations, multifaceted relationships, mutual receptions, entangled histories, processes of globalization, and a planetary perspective.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project number: 433147829. Heisenberg Programme, funding period 2021-2026.