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Jl. Parit Haji Husein I, Gg. Alqadar Dalam No. 09, Kecamatan Pontianak Tenggara, Kota Pontianak, Kalimantan Barat 78124, Indonesia
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INDONESIA
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Published by Elkuator Research and Publication
ISSN : -     EISSN : 31101305     DOI : -
Core Subject : Religion, Humanities, Art, Social,
Religion Arts Humanities Environmental Science Social Sciences
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality (JRD) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal exploring the intersections of religion, spirituality, and decolonial thought. It explores how religious traditions, theological frameworks, and spiritual practices are implicated and can respond to histories and structures of coloniality. This journal provides a critical platform for scholars, practitioners, and activists who engage with religious traditions, institutions, and epistemologies through decolonial lenses. The journal is published under Elkuator Research and Publication.
Arjuna Subject : Seni dan Humaniora - Studi Agama
Articles 18 Documents
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Sacred Legitimacy and Political Failure: Religion in Balthasar Klau’s Movement in Southern Belu, 1950–1965 Muhammad Jaris Almazani; Febi Setiyawati; Muhammad Lodhi Firmansyah
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 1 No. 2 (2025): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.24260/jrd.1.2.101

Abstract

The makdok movement led by Balthasar Klau in Southern Belu (1950–1965) reflected complex religio-political dynamics that went beyond mere heresy or local political events. Previous studies on Klau have largely emphasized historical perspectives, leaving a gap in understanding the symbolic meanings and spiritual role of the makdok as an instrument of political resistance in postcolonial society. This gap highlights the need for an anthropological inquiry into how Tetun cosmology, Catholic symbols, and modern political networks (PKI and BTI) were interwoven. The main research question addresses how the makdok functioned as an alternative authority negotiating power relations between adat, the Church, and the state. This study employed a qualitative-descriptive approach with its locus in Southern Belu, using an ethnohistorical method through archival research, literature review, and field testimonies. Data analysis was conducted interpretively within the framework of symbolic and political anthropology (Geertz, Comaroff & Comaroff). The findings reveal the hybridity of religious and political authority that constructed a utopian imagination of a world without labor, fair economic distribution, and promises of prosperity from the sea. The novelty of this study lies in the concept of a “political makdok” as a form of decolonialism from below. Recommendations emphasize further studies on the interrelation between local spirituality and modern organizations, as well as the potential of hybrid authority to form alternative models of power in postcolonial contexts.
A Review of Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús’s Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease Andi Alfian
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 1 No. 2 (2025): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.24260/jrd.1.2.140

Abstract

In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines excited delirium, a pseudo-racialized medical diagnosis that has been used to explain the deaths of Black and Brown people in police custody. Beliso-De Jesús argues that excited delirium is used to legitimize police violence against people who are stigmatized as “the drug-addled, unhinged, superhuman Black persons.” Through this book, and this is the most important aspect for me in reading this book, Beliso-De Jesús shows that Afro-Latine religious traditions, especially the practices of copresences (taking spirits and spiritualism seriously), can serve not only to understand this racial violence, but also to heal.
Text, Law, and Riot: The Coloniality of Religious Offense in Late Colonial Burma Phyo Win Latt
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.94

Abstract

This article investigates the 1938 Indo-Burman riots—an eruption of communal violence that occurred a decade before Burma’s independence—through the prism of Moulvi-hnint-Yogi Awada Sadan, a composite polemical text that became central to legal prosecution, political mobilization, and sectarian unrest. Rather than reducing the conflict to a simplistic narrative of “religious insult,” the study reconstructs the book’s multivocal authorship, multireligious composition, and its mediated circulation across pressrooms, monastic institutions, and colonial legal forums. The analysis foregrounds the coloniality of offence, examining how juridical categories such as “malicious intent” and “religious offence” were embedded within colonial legal frameworks, enabling the state to adjudicate symbolic injury while deflecting responsibility for structural violence. By tracing the trajectory from textual controversy to riot, trial, and legislative response, the article demonstrates how polemical disputes were instrumentalized to forge regulatory regimes that entrenched communal divisions. It concludes by exploring the afterlives of the text in contemporary Myanmar, where its memory continues to inform contentious debates around religion, identity, and legal governance.  
Decolonial Perspectives on Environmental Degradation and Yoruba Indigenous Religious Practice in Nigeria Samuel Babalola; Goodness Ayokunle
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.111

Abstract

Climate change and environmental degradation in southwestern Nigeria pose an existential threat to the ecological matrix at the heart of Yoruba indigenous religious practice, a knowledge system that colonial modernity has long marginalised, pathologised, and dispossessed. Trees and forests, rivers, and arable land are not merely material assets but sacred milieus, home to Orisa (deities) and ancestral spirits, constituting an indigenous cosmology that encodes centuries of ecological stewardship. This paper interrogates the compounding risks to foundational Yoruba religious life, including wood-carved shrines, iconographic sculptures, harvest-related offerings, and riverine rituals through a critical analysis of anthropogenic deforestation driven by extractive commercial timber economies, altered precipitative regimes (droughts and floods), and riverine pollution and desiccation. Drawing on recent empirical research and field surveys, this study documents the declining availability of high-quality hardwoods essential to shrine and sculptural production, the disruption of planting seasons by erratic rainfall, and the existential threats confronting river deities such as Osun as water volumes recede and pollution intensifies. Crucially, the paper centres indigenous responses as forms of decolonial agency: sacred groves and their associated taboos, long functioning as indigenous conservation mechanisms, are positioned here not as relics but as living epistemic resources threatened by colonial and postcolonial land-use regimes. The paper further engages contemporary cultural revitalisation efforts, including the UNESCO listing of the Osun-Osogbo grove as ambivalent sites where indigenous sovereignty and external institutional recognition converge and sometimes conflict. The paper argues that the sustainability of Yoruba religious and ecological life demands not merely technical conservation but the decolonisation of environmental governance itself, centring traditional ecological knowledge as an authoritative framework rather than a supplement to Western conservation paradigms.
Sacred Feminine: A Decolonial Reading of the Indus Mother Goddess and Gandhara Hariti Jalil Khan
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.102

Abstract

This article examines the colonial and patriarchal framing of female divinities in South Asian archaeology, using two case studies: the Indus Valley Mother deity figurines and the Gandhara deity Hariti. Both types of artifacts, which are currently housed in prominent European institutions such as the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were often overlooked in colonial scholarship and museum catalogues. While the Mother Goddess figurines were reduced to rudimentary "fertility idols" and the Hariti sculptures were demoted to secondary mythological significance in Buddhist art, masculine figures like as the Priest-King, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas were exalted as vital to South Asian religious tradition. This interpretive hierarchy reflects the complex interplay of colonial epistemologies and patriarchal beliefs that determined how South Asian religious traditions were represented abroad. Using a decolonial feminist lens, the study reinterprets these artifacts as essential religious icons representing feminine spirituality, protection, and fertility, contesting their erasure in colonial and patriarchal narratives. The article demonstrates how decolonial feminist readings of the Indus Mother Goddess and Hariti can restore the significance of female divinities while also contributing to more inclusive interpretations of religion, heritage, and museum practice.
From “Primitive Religion” to Cognitive Universal: Decolonizing the study of African Traditional Religions Saheed Anuoluwapo Agunbiade
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.90

Abstract

The marginalization of African Traditional Religions (ATRs) by Western scholarship and colonial authorities has long undermined their identity and legitimacy. Historically, ATRs have been the foundation of African society, shaping values, principles, worship practices, and philosophical outlooks. With the advent of Westernization through colonialism and imperialism, ATRs were labeled “fetishistic”, “primitive” , “superstitious”, and “inhumane”, mischaracterizations that delegitimized indigenous spirituality while promoting Western Christian traditions as superior. This ethnocentric bias alienated Africans from their religious heritage and eroded their cultural identity. While many ATR practices have parallels in Western religions, yet one has been privileged over the other to justify cultural domination. This paper employs the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) as a theoretical framework to interrogate these ethnocentric biases. CSR emphasizes universal cognitive mechanisms underlying religious thought, providing a platform to reinterpret ATRs as expressions of shared human cognitive capacities rather than exotic deviations from a normative standard. Through comparative and conceptual analysis, the paper argues that indigenous epistemologies,rooted in oral traditions, communal values, and relational ontologies, embody complex cognitive strategies comparable to those of any religion. By dismantling the “primitive” stereotype, this paper situates ATRs within a global discourse that recognizes their philosophical sophistication, cognitive legitimacy, and cultural resilience, thereby advancing a more inclusive and methodologically pluralist study of religion.
KUPI as a Networked Islamic Feminist Movement in Indonesia: Negotiating Gender Justice within Islamic Tradition Naufal Aulia Hanif; Asha Kun Nayla Faizin
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.148

Abstract

The Indonesian Women Ulama Congress (KUPI) has emerged as one of the most significant examples of Islamic feminist activism in Indonesia, seeking to address gender injustice through the issuance of fatwas. This article examines how KUPI enables women ulama to gain recognition as religious authorities while remaining rooted in the epistemology and sources of the Islamic tradition. It argues that KUPI should be understood not merely as a forum for women ulama or a fatwas-making institution, but as a networked Islamic feminist movement that functions as an epistemic space. Drawing on document analysis of KUPI’s official publications and relevant academic literature, and informed by Saba Mahmood’s concept of pious agency and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of epistemic recognition, this article demonstrates that KUPI’s institutional networks, collective processes of knowledge production, and methodology of fatwas formulation enable women’s lived experiences to become legitimate sources of Islamic legal reasoning. In doing so, KUPI creates the epistemic conditions through which women can establish and gain recognition for their religious authority from within the Islamic tradition.
Asa dalam Bara, Visi di Tengah Api: Pergulatan Gereja dalam Kelindan Identitas Etnis dan Agama di Maluku Vikry Reinaldo Paais
Journal of Religion and Decoloniality Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Religion and Decoloniality
Publisher : Elkuator Research and Publication

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.66277/jrd.2.1.418

Abstract

Identitas religius seseorang tidak dapat dipisahkan dari realitas sosial dimana ia bertumbuh. Keduanya berkelindan membentuk personifikasi diri sebagai bagian dari masyarakat sosial. Lewat Asa dalam Bara, Visi di Tengah Api: Pergulatan Gereja dalam Kelindan Identitas Etnis dan Agama di Maluku, Gaspersz menguraikan bagaimana ruang negosiasi antara identitas Kristen dengan etnisitas Maluku melebur menjadi satu identitas yang melekat pada diri orang Kristen Maluku. Identitas Kristen saat ini tak lekang dari sejarah masuknya Kristen Eropa di Maluku, perjumpaan berbagai macam kebudayaan dan etnisitas, kemudian ditempa oleh realitas konflik 1999, hingga akhirnya melahirkan identitas masyarakat saat ini.  Pergulatan panjang tersebut merupakan keniscayaan dari masyarakat sosial yang dinamis. Pada akhirnya, realitas ini perlu menjadi landasan untuk membangun kesadaran sosial dan teologis masyarakat Maluku sebagai masyarakat yang dinamis. Dengan begitu, proses berteologi tidak terpenjara pada teks Kristianitas eksklusif, melainkan mengakar pada kesadaran eksistensial ke-Maluku-an.

Page 2 of 2 | Total Record : 18

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