Academic religious studies and anticolonial protest: The case of ossetian nativist activism

Abstract

The article deals with а criticism of the concept of “religion” in two different intellectual projects. The first was carried out by the social anthropologist Talal Asad, who constructed his analysis of the conceptual apparatus of modern anthropology as a protest against the Eurocentrism of modern social and humanitarian sciences. This criticism made Asad a public intellectual, but not a social activist. The second case examined is the activity of Daurbek Makeev, an activist of the nativist religious movement in North Ossetia, who is working to revise the dominant understanding of religion in Russian society. In the course of this work, he moves from being an ethnic activist to a public intellectual with the prospect of taking the social position of a regular academic researcher of religion. In the face of acute polemics with representatives of stronger religious institutions, he, like some other activists of ethnic religions, is looking for new methods of legitimizing his project in the eyes of the general public. These foundations are found in the practices existing in the academy; specifically, the practices of revising those academic positions that consider any religion in the perspective of its compliance with the normatively understood Christianity. In many ways, reproducing the arguments of postcolonial cultural criticism, Makeev searches in the field of social sciences for those theories of religion that could remove oppositions between the spheres of the religious and the secular, the individual and the social. He finds his theory in approaches that discursively blur the line between academic practices and techniques for а spiritual quest and self-improvement, namely transpersonal psychology, which embeds scientistic reasoning into the spiritual quest of the New Age.