The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Indigenous Religions

Exciting developments in research among, with and by Indigenous scholars and communities are enriching a wide range of disciplines, methodologies and trans-disciplinary conversations. This growing field offers important insights and provocations about methods and approaches. Key issues such as relationality, decolonisation, research ethics, pedagogy and collaboration necessarily require improvements both in scholarly description and in scholarly practice. Similarly, critical themes for Indigenous people intersect strongly both with recent scholarly “turns”, such as embodiment, gender, performance, place, ontology, and materiality. The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Indigenous Religions reflects on appropriate approaches and methods with over 28 chapters by a team of international contributors. The Handbook is divided into three parts:

• Core themes and critical issues in research and debate about Indigenous Religions
• Disciplines and methods, focusing on ways in which researchers gain and share understanding about Indigenous religions
• Recent scholarship about broad regions of the world

Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including cosmology, diaspora, bodies and materiality, witchcraft and divination, ritual studies, ethnography and fieldwork, heritage studies, ecology, feminist methodologies, decolonial methods and Indigenist methods, research ethics, activism, health, and peoplehood, kinship and relations. The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Indigenous Religions is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and Indigenous studies, and the handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields such as sociology, anthropology, history and politics.

Afe Adogame is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA. His research focuses on interrogating new dynamics of religious experiences and expressions in Africa and the African diaspora. He is co-editor of the Routledge series Vitality of Indigenous Religions; Editor in Chief, AASR e-journal of Religion in Africa and Its Diaspora; and Deputy Editor, Journal of Religion in Africa (Brill).

Graham Harvey is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at The Open University, UK. His research largely concerns “the new animism”, especially in the rituals and protocols through which Indigenous and other communities engage with the larger-than-human world. He is co-editor of the Routledge series Vitality of Indigenous Religions and the Equinox series Religion and the Senses. He co-edited Indigenous Religions (Routledge 2018) with Amy Whitehead and has contributed to a significant number of other Indigeneity focused publications.