Functionalist Intuitions, Uncertainty, and Ontological Politics: Religious Studies for the Anthropocene
Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated within the debate over the diplomacy of common world face-to-face challenges of the Anthropocene. Within the functionalist tradition, uncertainty and lack of control defined the situation from which religion and magic ought to originate. They constitute the key characteristic of the Anthropocene as a specific historical condition, too. Their practical handling unleashes the full range of world-making activities and processes that shape ways of inhabiting the environment and thus provides an excellent point of analytical focus that can efficiently do without concepts of both religion and belief.