Decolonizing the Study of Religion

Podcast with Malory Nye (30 June 2020).

Interviewed by Christopher Cotter.

Transcribed by Helen Bradstock.

Audio and transcript available at:

http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/decolonizing-the-study-of-religion/

Christopher Cotter (CC): Regular Listeners to the Religious Studies Project will probably be quite familiar with the critique that the whole notion of the category of religion, and particularly the development of the world religions paradigm, is tied to a history of colonialism, exploitation and is built upon Western, European, Protestant Christian models, and so on. Though also, possibly, if you’ve listened back in our catalogue to an interview we had with Rudy Busto, you’re familiar with the idea that just as religion is a constructed and problematic category, so too is the notion of race. And joining me today to discuss something which grows out of both of these arguments is Malory Nye. And we’re going to be discussing decolonising the study of religion and what it might mean for us to decolonise the study of religion. And to sort-of own, and build from, and move on from the problematic entanglement of the study of religion with colonialism, racism, and exploitation. Malory Nye is an independent scholar, based in Perth in Scotland, with teaching activities at the Universities of Glasgow and Sterling. And he’s also a research scholar at the Ronin Institute. And he’ll be known to many Listeners through his book, Religion: The Basics, which is now being updated for a third edition; or perhaps, his blogging at Medium.com; his podcasts Religion Bites and History’s Ink; or through his editorship of the journal, Culture and Religion. Of particular relevance to today’s podcast are his 2019 articles, “Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness“, in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and, “Decolonizing the Study of Religion“, in Open Library of Humanities. So that’s the topic of today’s interview. And also his forthcoming book with Bloomsbury, which is due out later this year – entitled Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Difference – which I’m very excited to get my hands on when it comes out. So first off, Malory, welcome to the Religious Studies Project!

Malory Nye (MN): Well, thanks very much! It’s very good to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

CC: Not a problem. We’re recording at Edinburgh, just before you’re going to give a paper, in the Religious Studies research seminar, on the topic of today’s interview. But before we get into the meat of it, I suppose there’s a few key things to get out of the way. What does decolonisation mean? Or decolonising? I think you want to make a distinction between those two notions. And then, also –although I said Listeners would be familiar with the entanglement of the categories of religion and race with colonialism etc., it might be good for us to begin with a reiteration of those critiques.

MN: Well, yes. They’re big questions. We could probably spend most of the time just on those, even before we get to the substance of that. Decolonising – I put it in the active, rather than decolonisation. It’s not something that’s going to happen, as a thing, and we can say “Great, we’ve done it! We’ve ticked that off. We’ve achieved the metrics.” Of course decolonisation, or decolonising, has become one of those buzz words on the left of academia. It’s become a word like “intersectionality”. “Let’s decolonise so and so.” And very often this is picked up by the management, by the universities, as an aspiration to show that universities can attract the right sort of students, can show that they’re meeting their so-called “woke” credentials of being fair, being just, showing that they’ve got diversity. Now, for me, decolonisation and a decolonising approach is a lot more profound than that. Of course decolonisation refers to something that happened politically, economically, structurally in the mid-twentieth century. The end of the European empire or the formal European empires, such as the British leaving South Asia, the Malay Peninsula, from Africa, and so on. Newly-formed independent countries becoming de-colonial countries. It happened also with France and other European powers. And so, of course, from that we’ve got the famous French scholar Fanon, also Albert Memmi, writing about the decolonising process (5:00). And emerging from that a wave of African scholars – Mbembe, Ngugi, and so on – talking about, what does it mean to be a decolonised person, to be a decolonised nation, to be a decolonised culture? And those question have not gone away. Now, as I talk about that political process, there is also the rise across political studies, post-colonial studies, of the idea of settled colonialism. The idea . . . the recognition that that’s fundamental to a lot of the political order of today: settler colonialism, European, predominantly British colonialism, that didn’t de-colonise. That so much of the United States, and Canada, and other former British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand/Aortearoa, are the products of that settler colonialism, of people who came and settled, did it through land appropriation, through land theft and usually through displacement and very often genocide of the indigenous peoples. And that is still with us today. And we can only look . . . . Most recently, this week was the week of the Oscars in California. And for the first time, a recipient of an award actually doing a land acknowledgement, acknowledging that the place of the award of the Oscars is on the land of people who were former holders of that land. And still are. Always are, always were. Always were, always will be. That settler colonialism is part and parcel of the current world system, and decolonisation, or decolonising, is also a recognition that the structures of colonialism might have been decolonised formally, but are also very much in place within the world that we live in today: economic colonisation, cultural imperialism. And I follow writers such as Mignolo and Quijano who argue that we’re in a new form of colonial modernity, that’s coloniality modernity, that is not the same as it was, say, a hundred years ago. But the idea of knowledge, of science, of politics, of economics, of world structures being very much about supporting a particular power interest. And that’s very much a sort-of European power interest. So decolonisation is arguing, in many respects, what does a world look like if we challenge that, if we go beyond that? Particularly in the sphere of academia – what we’re doing as academics – whether it be in the study of people in terms of sociology, political science, history, English studies, literature, or within the specific studies of religion. What does decolonising mean, once we recognise the current situation, and the history that got us to where we are now? So that’s not sort-of a simple process. That is a very large process. Understanding the history, understanding the present and understanding the people and things that we’re studying within the context of all that history and all that politics. And – just in this initial introduction – to also recognise that this isn’t just simply a game: it’s not just simply a matter of putting a woke badge on, about putting decolonising on your syllabus, or decolonising your curriculum. It is about recognising it’s not a metaphor – Eve Tuck – this argument that decolonisation is a matter of life and death. It’s something that, as I said, in terms of settlement, in terms of land, in terms of genocide, in terms of the political structures of today, decolonising is recognising the violence, recognising the injustice, recognising the problems of today’s world and trying to think of ways in which we can decolonise the knowledge systems behind that. And that’s sort-of where my work is trying to challenge some of the ways in which we take what we’re doing for granted, in terms of the idea of religion, in terms of studies of religion. And so that sort-of answered your first question.

CC: Yes but you’re linking nicely into, then . . . . So, if we’re going to decolonise our knowledge production and the way in which the whole discipline has been built up, or the whole field has been built up, yes, we need to talk a little bit about what is the history (10:00). So I think, if you could take us through, quite quickly, through the history of these intertwined notions of religion and race as sort-of academic constructs. But then we’ll get onto: so, if we have that critique, and we accept it, and we even teach it – but, what does it mean to teach it? And what does it mean to revise things?

MN: As you said, I think many listeners to the RSP podcasts will be familiar with some of the critiques of the world religions approach. That is so integral to the way the discipline the study of religion is being taught at all levels, from schools, through to universities, and indeed much research. And, particularly, job appointments. World religions is very much the idea that structures how people think about the study of religion: you’re going to be a specialist in a particular topic; you’re going to be in a particular religion, a part of the world, dividing up. And that is part of that history. Of course, Tomoko Masuzawa’s work on the critiquing, or thinking through, how this particular idea of understanding the world – of the pluralism, the diversity, the universalism of nineteenth century European thought – produced that world religions paradigm. And, of course, part-and-parcel with that, the structures of empire, the structures of racism within the empire. And both these evolved, of course, together. They developed together in the nineteenth and twentieth century at the height of the European industrial empire, structural empire. But of course it was slowly forming in the long period from round about the 1500s onwards, following the growth of European colonialism under the Spanish, under the Portuguese, and then under the Dutch. The British, the Germans and the French implemented it in various ways, of course: through industrial chattel enslavement, through the slave trade; through the creation of different people under different rubrics, under racialised rubrics of creating Africans, creating Asians; creating religions or non-religions that go with them; the “primitive” religions – Hinduism, Buddhism – that then became the technology of knowledge, the technology that structured the Empire. Through, too, its systematisation in the nineteenth century, as I said, with the formation of the world religions paradigm, and the slight displacement of the theological centrality of Christianity within the academy – which of course, in the 20th century, became the field of Religious Studies. So it’s got relatively short roots in the crystallisation in the disciplines that we know today, such as Religious Studies, but very long roots in terms of the formation of these ideas of religion and race as somehow separate but intertwined, very much; ways of thinking about difference and ways in which that difference could be managed by the states, by empires, under colonial rule.

CC: And as you pointed out in some of your writing, Religious Studies, as it emerged, whether it’s called Religious Studies, or Study of Religion or whatever, it became the study of the “other”. I guess in the UK context we have Theology – or here we’re in a School of Divinity – and Religious Studies becomes the place where the “other stuff” is studied, under these headings of the different isms. But even things like Philosophy – you pointed out that, well, we’ll have Philosophy departments which are effectively Western European Philosophy departments, and then people who are specialists in philosophies from other regions, or associated with other traditions, find themselves in the Study of Religions department, in some way teaching that philosophy, rather than in Philosophy. So it is sort-of built into the structure of the way disciplines, and fields, and departments work as well.

MN: Yes, I mean these are huge debates, going across much of the Humanities. Is Philosophy just simply white philosophy or European philosophy? And added to that is the question, were the Greeks Europeans? Can we really count the Greek and the classical world? This is a big debate going on in Classics: where does the classical world end? Were the Egyptians part of that classical world? The classical Egyptians, the ancient . . . .

CC: Yes.

MN: And so on. (15:00) But also, in terms of Philosophy, what about the great philosophical systems? How European philosophy has been defined can perhaps include Chinese philosophies, Indian, South Asian philosophies, indigenous African philosophies, and so on. It’s very much about boundary maintenance within all of these fields. Religious Studies has been a little bit more eclectic. And this, perhaps, sort-of is one of the reasons why I was attracted to it as an anthropologist. It hasn’t sought to put the walls around what Religious Studies is doing in the way that Philosophy has, in terms of whiteness, in terms of the great white tradition, or white civilisation tradition, that Philosophy has, and Classics has. Rather it’s sort-of like, as you said, “the other” – and here I’m waving my fingers about – the otherness of South Asians, of other traditions than Europeans. And it has been constructed in that way. It’s not an accident that that’s happened as you said. Thinking through the way in which Sociology became, in a sense, the home of white European society, or the study of white European society – or derived society – in North America. And Anthropology became the study of anything that goes beyond that. So we can go to look at the debates happening in Sociology at the moment, trying to re-find or rediscover the disciplinary history of Sociology, particularly with the writer WEB Du Bois who has been excluded from the history of the telling of the history of Sociology, although his Atlanta school in the late nineteenth century, earlier twentieth century predates many of the founders, such as Robert Park’s in Sociology, in Chicago. He was one of the first sociologists. But because he wrote about black sociology, African American sociology, he has been sort-of left out of that history. Because it doesn’t fit within the idea of the study being about white European society, or however it might be defined. Of course there were structural racism and actual racism involved. He couldn’t be a great sociologist being a person of colour, being an African American. The idea that somehow he couldn’t be one of that canon of the great men because he was perceived to be of the wrong colour, racialised differently. So religious Studies has that as its starting point, studying beyond. And it has revelled, it has celebrated its positon as being about studying people who are different from white Christianity, people who are different from the norms of white European society, of white society. But yet, it has stumbled in its simplicity, I’d say, of trying to deal with that. And particularly it has largely ignored these questions of race and racialisation. The questions up until quite recently – the last few decades of Empire and colonialism – have been left off the table, as they were in anthropology, up until the 1980s and 1990s. And the question of how to understand that, and put that into practice, in terms of the people that Religious Studies has been looking to try and understand, to write about, to empathise with, to engage with – either as insiders or outsiders – and so on within the field of the study of religion. These issues just have not been addressed. And particularly I’d put that, the centrality of whiteness, within the field of Religious Studies. Although up until the eighties there were a few scholars of colour – people of colour doing scholarship in the study of religion – very often on the fringes. In Japan, if we look at the histories of Religious Studies, up until the seventies and eighties, there were small numbers of people of colour, but most of the big questions and the research agendas go back to people such as, of course, in Britain, Ninian Smart and similar white scholars in North America. And that has set the agenda for where we are today. So it’s no surprise that questions of race and colonialism have been sort-of put aside as well. Putting aside, of course, the funding issues, the universities . . . and, as I said, in today’s world perhaps you might get funding for talking about decolonising or decolonisation from a beneficent university. Back in the sixties and seventies, you were less likely to ask the critical race questions of the study of religion (20:00). And these questions of whiteness, there’s been a lot of work being done in Legal Studies, in Sociology, in Political Studies, which is yet to even start to be discussed in the field of Religious Studies. I see it somewhere on the fringes. There are people beginning to put this as a research agenda. There’s certainly no texts. No introductory texts are really taking this history, these research questions, these issues of race and colonialism alongside, of course, an intersectional interest in how this works in terms of gender and other structural issues: gender is created by race, and race is created by gender and colonialism and our history – how all these things go together. The field of Gender Studies is beginning to develop, and it needs to develop in terms of how it works with race and colonialism as well.

CC: That’s excellent, thanks. And what I’ve often discovered, you know, plenty of the studies or books or courses and what-not will pay lip-service to the . . . they’ll say “Religion is a constructed category, bound up in colonial history and referring to Protestant Christianity.” And then, “Let’s just get on with using it, just like we would normally do.” That’s something that we should try and avoid! Also in my own teaching, I’ve got a course here on Atheism, Humanism and Non-religion, I’m aware that everyone I’m looking at is white. I’ve put a week into the course structure where I focus on issues of gender and ethnicity into one week – which isn’t an ideal solution. It’s my first attempt to go “Right, at least raise that this is an issue, and let’s try and think about it.” But I didn’t have the time, or skill, or expertise to properly infuse it throughout the course. So what can we do to avoid simply just pulling up another chair at the table, and saying, “You can have a voice in here, too”? Or just saying, “We’ll nod that to that as an issue. We’ll acknowledge it, but not really do very much with it.” What can we do?

MN: OK, so . . . .

CC: (Laughs) How do we decolonise the Study of Religion?

MN: I’ve been quite mild, I would say, in terms of where I’ve been going so far. Some of things I know have sort-of got quite radical edges. But the idea of decolonising, as I said, is not just simply doing something performative that is seen as being good, and it will add a little bit extra to your syllabus, or your thinking, or your bibliography. And as I put it in my most recent article on decolonisation, it’s not about an extra chair at the table, it’s about changing the whole damn room. It’s about getting rid of the tables, reconstructing the tables, doing whatever you want. But decolonising is saying that what we’re doing at the moment is wrong, is not working. And that, for me, has implications that I’m still trying to work out in terms of . . . like that word “religion”. You know, should we be talking about religion, and faith, and sacredness, and all these things? Even if it is a native . . . even if it is an insider category, it’s got such huge historical and political baggage to it. Should we not just simply say we’re going to try and deconstruct it? I know this is an argument: what do we do after we’ve deconstructed it? What then? Well, we carry on deconstructing. There’s that long discussion we have following one of your earlier interviews with Tim. There’s a lot more to be done in terms of trying to put the idea of religion . . . in terms of these categories of race and religion. So if we’re struggling, I would say, to find a reading – even if we put it in those simplistic terms of: why is my curriculum white? – #whyismycurriculumwhite – the big question in decolonising . . . which is quite a straightforward thing if we’re looking at say the English Studies canon, because there’s plenty of English literature that is written by people racialised as non-white. If we’re doing it there, that might be quite easy. We can even do that in broad terms, if we look hard enough, in terms of the history of the Study of Religion (25:00). And, as I said, the history, the development of the discipline isn’t solely by people who racialise themselves as white European and North American white, and so on. We can do that, but I would say, “Step back further, and ask the question, ‘What are the questions I’m asking here, that lead to this body of knowledge that I’m choosing to teach, or to write about, or to research?’” If there is not this engagement with race theory, intersectional theory, gender theory, queer theory and so on, in what I’m doing, perhaps – and here, as I said, I’m getting quite radical – maybe we’re doing it wrong? I’d say we are doing it wrong, if we’re not doing the race theory, if we’re not doing the intersectional gender theory, and seeing how it works within the contexts. And I don’t mean just simply saying having a week at looking at queer theory and non-belief – I’m sure it can be done – or race theory and non-belief. It’s about saying, “How does that change all the questions I’ve got? And how does it change how the people I want to teach, I want to write for, I want to engage with . . . how does it change all of that? So even if that means us having to take a sabbatical, and reading it up, to try and formulate those questions to our field of research, I’d say that’s time well worth spending. Because otherwise we’re leaving out the big elephant in the room – what I call the white elephant in the room. Or, put it another way: in white club, the first rule of white club is that we don’t talk about whiteness. Because we just assume it’s there. It’s invisible. It’s an empty space. But it is so much feeding into the questions that we’re asking. As I say all this, I’m very conscious: here we are, two white men, sitting in a room talking about whiteness. There’s no celebration here of the fact that two men, after centuries of scholarship, have finally got together and started talking about whiteness. It should have happened two hundred and fifty plus years ago, that this consciousness of how it’s going. . . . But it is also about recognising that the perspectives that I’m bringing, that others are bringing, other white scholars and so on, is only part of a much bigger picture. And it is about recognising that there is a lot of scholarship going on which is directly bearing on whatever we’re doing, and a lot of that is by marginalised people in the academy. Very often people who don’t have fulltime jobs, don’t have job security, because they’re marginalised in terms of their place in the academy, and also because of their race, their racialisation, their colour, their gender, and other issues. It’s a very harsh, hostile environment, I’d say, for people working within the field, within the intersections, between these sorts of areas. And the question is, why aren’t we using their scholarship more? Do we have to go back to the learned professor who’s got there, and we all recognise them and . . . . I’ll take one example, Charles Taylor. If you want to talk about secularism, everybody goes to Taylor. Now he’s a great scholar, he says some great things. I was just recently looking at Vincent Lloyd’s work on secularisms and race, and how the idea of secularity . . . how the idea of the secular state is a thoroughly racialised idea. But there’s nothing in Taylor about that. There is nothing in Taylor that sort-of explores the way secularisation is defined as a white space, as a place for whiteness in America to be expressed. And then how that becomes racialised against other categories such as religion and church, and black churches. It comes down to a particular example of Martin Luther King becoming this folk hero of post-racialisation, where the Martin Luther King monument, in Washington, doesn’t mention his many statements about race and race equality, and doesn’t even mention much of his preaching as a Christian minister. So, going back to what I was saying: look for the scholarship, look for what marginalised voices are saying within a particular sphere, and see how that bears – I mean, whether it be looking in terms of people of colour, women of colour, queer people of colour – how is that challenging what you’re doing? Even if you don’t agree with it (30:00). But how is that challenging? And, of course, pass that on. Amplify it, in terms of scholarship, in terms of teaching. I’m not saying I’ve got all the answers, and I’m not saying “Here’s a white fellow saying that you’ve got to do this,” and whatever. I’m just saying that I see my position as somebody who’s lived with a lot of privilege within the academy, because of being structurally in this particular place of being a white man at the time when it favoured people such as myself. It still does. Stand back and think, “Well, what can I do to challenge those structures, to challenge the thinking that has brought me to where I am?” And engage with that thinking. Engage with how that relates to how you’d like to see your study of religion. And to see the Study of Religion as something that recognises its past, recognises its racialisation, recognises how the very critical concepts that we’ve got are so rooted, so blood-soaked with that colonial history – the violence and, of course, the current politics of today. We’re not detached from it, even if we’re well-meaning enough to put ourselves aside from it.

CC: Absolutely. We’re already coming up on time. But I think, as a final question, I would want to ask you, yeah . . . so you’ve been getting at it there, and I was hinting at it as well. I think we both, in this room, and many of our Listeners will be thinking, “Yes, I want to not just diversify my knowledge-base, but also radically rethink a lot of the assumptions that I’m bringing to my work, and be more conscious of a lot of these issues, and the entanglements of the Study of Religion with racism, exploitation with whiteness, maleness. I want to be that better scholar. I want to do it. But when am I going to find the time? What am I going to do? How can I do that if I don’t have the luxury of having that sabbatical?” Or that sort of thing. I guess, as a final question for people like me who want to do better, but don’t even really know – apart from to go and do a Masters in Gender Studies or Critical Race Theory, or so on – are there any, like, key things – key texts, or key scholars, or key departments that are doing great work in this area – things where you can maybe say, “Well if you’ve not got that much time, this would be a great place to start.” Apart from your book, of course – which is naturally a place people should go to, as well!

MN: I must add a caveat on top of what you said at the beginning. It’s 2020 that we’re talking here, early 2020. We’re not going to see the book out this year, unfortunately. So I was seriously ill last year, and a lot of things have been knocked back. And I’m still working on the revisions for my Religion: The Basics book, which hopefully will be out . . . or at least ready to be out by the end of this year. I’m not saying that my book’s going to be the only place to explore these issues. There is a lot of good scholarship. And I’m trying to put this together. And that’s part of what my blogging is trying to do. Not just simply to say, “Here’s what Malory Nye’s got to say about these things.” But point to the great scholarship that . . . .

CC: That you’re encountering.

MN: Yes, sitting on the shoulders of. And trying to say, “Have you noticed this?” Basically. “This is going on.” So, I won’t give a list here, but there are long bibliographies. I’d also say, ask some basic questions. It’s not just simply “Have you read Du Bois? Or have you read Vincent Lloyd? Or have you read some of these great volumes that are coming out about race and religion? Have you read about this wealth of scholarship about decolonising and decolonisation? But also ask some basic questions about what you’re doing. And this is part of what I did in that paper on “Decolonising the Study of Religion”. I picked up one text that I’ve sort-of dipped into and never taught, thank goodness, but dipped into Daniel Pal’s book, Seven Theories / Nine Theories of Religion. And I was hugely depressed to read one particular part of it. I’ve not gone much further. I’m toying with the idea of doing a more substantial critique (35:00). But his discussion of Durkheim as a theory- Durkheim’s theory of religion. I’ve got nothing against Durkheim and his theory of religion – apart from the gross colonialism and racism of the work, taking this particular group in Central Australia, indigenous people, and saying they are indicative, they are representative of humankind’s early history. That they are the primitive elementary form of the religious life. Now that was Durkheim back in the beginning of the twentieth century, where it was OK to be a racist.

CC: Yes, he could maybe be forgiven for being a product of his time in some way – but we can still know it’s not ok.

MN: This is the time of Du Bois, as well. It’s not to say that he should be given a free pass on that. But my problem is more of Pal’s amplifying that racism, in a book that’s still being published, saying that Durkheim is taking this as representative of the sort-of primitive stage of humankind – these people who were, at that point, being displaced, who were being herded into camps, whose children were being stolen from them in Central Australia, somehow being classified as this great sort-of representation of early humanity – that can tell us about what religion is about. And I would just simply say, “Ask some basic questions. If this seems racist, it is racist.” As simple as that. Is this amplifying, is this demonstrating the racism of colonialism or the colonialism of racism? I use a lot Patrick Wolfe’s phrase, “Race is colonialism speaking”. Whenever we talk about race, there is colonialism. And we see this today in the politics of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, all this. That goes back to what Quijano, and all these others, are saying about colonial modernity. It’s all there. It all being reproduced and it’s being reproduced in scholarship as much as it’s being reproduced in world politics, of policy of Africa. So what I’m saying is, ask these questions. And if you’ve got further questions there is no simple answers. I sort-of thought I should hold this as an idea that I’d like to develop. Nobody’s got the monopoly on these things. I’d like to put together another Seven Theories of Religion which go completely against the grain of Daniel Pal’s: writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, W. Du Bois, and so on. Writers who challenge our concepts of religion, and what religion is, and even the idea that religion is this thing that we can define, and explain, and talk about, and talk about its functions. Ways in which the idea of religion is a historical sort-of product of colonialism – what we talk about as that. And, of course, Tomoko Masuzawa is one of those people who has done that in a very sort-of blinding way, in terms of pushing through a particular understanding of: this is how we got to where we are, in talking about this. So I’d love to sort-of say, “Here’s a great place to start,” whether it was written by me, or written by some other scholar who could probably do it a lot better than I could. But ask these questions. And google is your friend, there! Google scholar is your friend, in terms of finding that scholarship on decolonisation. There is a lot of it out there. But one of the people I take huge inspiration from is the scholar Sarah Ahmed who was previously at Goldsmith’s college, before she resigned over issues of student dealing with sexual harassment and assault. But now has become an independent scholar who blogs very regularly. She’s just recently done a lot of work on complaint in the university. But her most recent book is Living a Feminist Life, based on her feministkilljoy blog, which I would strongly recommend – both the book and the blog. And there’s a particularly good one, on the site, I use about white men saying that it is so easy – going back to what I was saying about Taylor and others: white men cite other white men. And if we go along with that game we’re reproducing not just an event, we’re reproducing the whole structure of white patriarchy, of a colonial modernity within our scholarship. And, as I said, work against the grain of that as much as you can, in terms of the questions that you ask, and the people that you choose to read. That’s not to say it’s an easy task. It’s one . . . I don’t think that there’s a lot of time for any of us to do that.

CC: It’s a life-long task. And one that will probably never be possible to complete (40:00). But Malory, you’ve left us with some . . . a lot of in-depth material, but also a lot of questions that can, and should, be taken to basically everything that anyone who’s listening to this is working on! So, with that, this podcast has served a double purpose, at least – if not more! So, thanks very much.

MN: OK. Well thanks very much, too. I mean look out for my third edition of Religion: The Basics when it comes out. I will be dealing with a lot of these issues, briefly, in that. And that’s part of the problem why it’s taken so long. I was asked to get working on that about eight years ago and it’s still in process. But, yes, my book on Race and Religion – or whatever it may be called in the end – that should be appearing in the next few years, anyway.

CC: Fantastic. We look forward to it.

MN: Thanks very much.

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