Policing Whiteness through Pagan Studies

Abstract: A critical decolonial perspective on academic practice in pagan studies, possibly with relevance for the understanding of whiteness in the wider context of the Western world. I will show core patterns in the construction of whiteness, that have historically served to reject other-than-modern relational ways of knowing in the imposition of modern white self-image on euro-descendants. Today such discourse is mostly criticized, but I will show how it still lives in the application of paradoxical motifs ascribed through the pagan imaginary when the purpose is the policing euro-descended persons attempting to dissent from whiteness.

Presenter bio: Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen has researched counter-modern dividuation in Brazilian orisha religion, i.e. how deities are realized on the epistemological premises of modernity.. His present work focuses on reengaging and dialoguing with rejected animist knowledge and kinship with the greater community of beings in North European cultural history. (https://linktr.ee/runehr)