RELIGION, DECOLONIALITY AND THE PLURALIST PRINCIPLE

Abstract

The text presents the results of the research whose objective is to analyze the relationship between decolonial thought, religious studies and the pluralist principle. Methodologically, the research is centered on the formulation of syntheses related to decolonial thinking, with the use of diversified sources, but with a certain theoretical framework, especially the notion of “between-place” and of borders, associated with the tensions between the sociologies of absences and the emergence of identities and criticisms of the forms of coloniality of power, of knowledge and being. Such sources also correspond to some of the main conceptual bases of the pluralist principle. In this sense, there is a circularity in the presentation of these two perspectives, mediated by the concern with the implications of the decolonial vision for religious studies. Among the results of the research are the descriptions of some decolonial tasks: (i) the criticism of the vision of a single thought, (ii) the revision of the perspective of “centrocentrisms”, (iii) the questioning of the vision of universalism in the sciences and ethics, (iv) the critical analysis of the supremacy of modern technical-scientific formal rationality and a careful assessment of the merely conceptual form of knowledge production, (v) the review of the notion of the individual devoid of interaction with the community, the history, nature and the cosmos, and (vi) the examining the ideology of rigid and fixed identities.