From Objects to Subjects of Religious Studies in Africa: Methodological Agnosticism and Methodological Conversion

In reaction to late nineteenth-century (social) scientific studies of religion as an epiphenomenon of something else, whether structures of society or those of the mind, early twentieth-century phenomenological approaches attempted to study religion as a thing in itself. Due to secularization, among other factors, scholars of religion abandoned the phenomenological approach and its notion of religion as sui generis in the early 1970s,1 and advocated methodological agnosticism, at least in the West. Since then there has been a mostly hidden but sometimes manifest tension between “Western” and “non-Western” approaches, or dominant and peripheral voices in the study of religion, which call for a postcolonial approach.2 In this chapter I analyze a debate on these issues between members of the African Association for the Study of Religions (aasr) which was established at the first Regional Conference in Africa of the International Association for the History of Religions (iahr), held at Harare in 1992.3 Based on the proceedings of this conference, one of the founding fathers of the aasr, Jan Platvoet,4 wrote a chapter entitled From Object to Subject for a volume he co-edited. In this chapter he described and analyzed the shift in the study of religion in Africa from the era in which Africa was the “object” of European historians, anthropologists, and theologians, to the era in which Africa became the “subject” of the study of religion in Africa. Platvoet5 con-