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) – Projektnumber: 433147829. Heisenberg Programme, funding period 2021-2026.

Subproject 1 of Relational Persons, Arts, and the Cosmos. The Matter of Indigenous and Pagan Spiritualities in the Americas

The project challenges common academic representations of Aztec cosmovision based on the ontology of the modern Western sciences and searches for a better understanding Aztec ontology, epistemology, and practice. Inspired by theories and perspectives from the new animism and the ontological turn, I analyze Aztec practiced, embodied, and material concepts of persons (human and nonhuman), land, cosmos, and deities. Research questions are:

• How is our category of religion challenged and changed if we understand Aztec ontology as practical and empirical knowledge?
• What can we learn about Aztec human-animal relationships by analyzing the Indigenous concept of nahualli?
• Are Aztec ontology and epistemology relational?
• Did the Aztec distinguish between natural and supernatural? Did they see their deities as being supernatural–or as natural?

Subproject 2 of Relational Persons, Arts, and the Cosmos. The Matter of Indigenous and Pagan Spiritualities in the Americas

The project examines the identity politics in discourses about Indigenous and (Neo-)Pagan spiritualities, paying particular attention to the interactions between insiders and outsiders, academics and activists, Indigenous and white people. Of particular interest are the concepts of religion, spirituality, practice, tradition, knowledge, and art as well as understandings of nonhuman persons, “ecological wisdom,” and relational ontology in these discourses. Research questions are:

• How have outsiders, insi­ders, academics, activists, (Indigenous) Natives, and (white) Pagans interacted in the last decade in the discourse about Indige­nous religions?
• How have these interactions influenced the emergence of a pan-Indian identity?
• How are the concepts of religion, spirituality, practice, knowledge, and art defined in these dis­courses?
• Which role is given to ideas about the “ecological wisdom” and relational ontology of Indigenous traditions take in these discourses?
• What consequences do we draw in the Study of Religions regarding our use of concepts as well as academic methodology and epistemology?

I am currently preparing for the press a second, revised and enlarged edition of my textbook Die Kelten: Geschichte, Kultur und Sprache, originally published in 2015. This new edition, to be published later this year, will take account of recent research in the field and, unlike its pre­de­cessor, will contain numerous illustrations.

For utb publishers, I am also working on a textbook outlining the history of the Study of Religions in Western Europe, highlight­ing not only important trends in the history of academic Religionswissenschaft, but also the history of ideas about religion and the religions from the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity to the Modern Period.

A long-term project of mine is an intellectual biography of the Indologist and Iranian scholar Martin Haug (1827–1876), whose work was of pivotal importance for the study of Zoroastrianism. The book will be based on hitherto unpublished docu­ments and private correspondence, high­light­ing both his scholarly works and his relations with contemporary orientalists.

In my study of ancestral memorative practices, I discuss some contemporary dynamics of ancestral sacrifices in a postcolonial and transatlantic setting and the tendency towards what might be labelled as spiritualisation, that is the conceptual link to the religion-spirituality-divide that dominates contemporary alternative religiosities. This shift signals the dropping of political and legal functions while elevating the aspect of collective identity. Ancestors represent the meaning that the past has for the people living in the present. This meaning is not necessarily a rational, semantic or even spoken/speakable meaning. It may be so, especially if connected to affective narratives. But it can also be movement, sound, smell, taste and/or a visual impression. While the ancestral connection is by definition always there, it underlies dynamics of popularity, necessity and style. I focus on African and African-American contexts while also looking at entanglements with Euro-American and Asian practices of ancestral remembering and communication.

In order to trace pathways of secularisation and secularity in Africa I highlight a particular movement that carried great ideological weight at the time of most countries’ independence in the 1950s and 60s, namely African Socialism. The development toward state secularism was structurally very similar throughout the continent independently of whether political leaders opted for the “West” or the “East” in the Cold War. However, in opposition to Soviet ideology, African Socialism was famously anti-atheist. With the wish to fend off Marxist atheism as a supposedly necessary aspect of socialism, ideologues in African socialism were among the few politicians in Africa even to address the place of religion in a secular state at all. I trace the roots of African Socialism in US-American Pan-Africanism as well as the interconnected colonial opposition movement grounded in Marxist anti-imperialism. I also take a closer look at the education of some prominent state leaders, such as Nyerere, Nkrumah, Touré and Senghor, to explain the importance of Christian mission schools and Islamic madrasahs as points of access to social, intellectual and institutional participation in global anti-colonial movements. I argue that state secularism in Africa at the time of independence, as demonstrated most visibly in African Socialism, is more about suppressing and/or balancing the traditional powers of religious leaders than about a fundamental critique of a religious way of life. In turn, the implicit association of socialism and Marxism with atheism needs further scrutiny in a global perspective.

Travelogues are a rich source through which to explore observations of everyday culture and rituals, perceptions of the world order, and narrative strategies of othering. In this project, I discuss some travelogues written by West Africans in the early 19th c. (servants, intellectuals, missionaries and a pilgrim to Mecca) [forthcoming]; and other travelogues written by East Africans (coastal Swahili Muslims, diasporic Shi’i and Parsi South Asians, Christian Ugandans) in the late 19th and 20th c. The authors travel the same routes within Africa which would later be followed by Europeans. Some of the servants accompanied their masters to Europe or even as far as Siberia. I argue that the texts (including journals, retrospectives, and ethnographies) must be read as documents of African cosmopolitanism. Mobility enables the authors to subvert the imperial world order by re-framing it narratively according to their own religious identity. This gives rise to reflections on humanity, equality and the beauty of knowledge. As all texts were either commissioned by Europeans or edited by their translators before publication they do not document naively ‘authentic’ perspectives of their African authors but reflect the complexities of communication within strict racial hierarchies. I point to the potential of religion to invert colonial centres and peripheries: European metropoles become places of exotic fascination or exasperation while the familiar practices of co-religionists can turn the ‘hinterland’ into centres of learning.