5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The Africa continent remains a contested terrain within the politics of knowledge production, consumption, and commodification, albeit her (post)colonial experiences. Euro-American scholarship dominated the academic study of African religions, impinged their methodologies, thought-patterns and worldviews. These exogenous knowledges impacted on Indigenous knowledge systems, resulting in multiple discourses and knowledges, a chasm of epistemological richness and bankruptcy. Thus, knowledge-production and consumption are continually contested and negotiated in ways that result in the reification of some meaning-making systems, the invention of others, and in a kind of “hybridized” epistemologies.

Popular sociological binaries - public/private realms, sacred/mundane, religion/nonreligion, enchanted/disenchanted have acquired a peculiar Western connotation. The perception of religion as a phenomenon separate from other social structures hardly reflects religious imaginaries as lived, embodied, experienced, and expressed in African worldviews and religioscapes. But how has western scholarship contributed both to the understanding of indigenous ways of knowing and lifeways, and a path to its obscurity and public misunderstanding? In a bid to develop innovative approaches to studying religion that emphasize intersection with other social institutions, what can sociologists of religion learn from indigenous epistemologies as new ways of knowing? What key developments in Africa might encourage sociologists to think and know about religion in new reflexive ways? How have empirical studies exploring such fluid processes formed an established genre of sociological research in Africa in the last decades? How might new ways of knowing enhance conceptual, theoretical, methodological interpretation of religious developments globally? What can indigenous knowledge systems teach sociologists of religion globally?