The Ontological Turn’s New Animists and the Concept of Belief

Abstract

The purpose of this article is threefold: first, to demonstrate ways in which new materialist scholarship has been underappreciated in religious studies, particularly with regard to its complications of belief talk; second, to suggest how this underappreciation is, in part, due to a prior misunderstanding of what is “new” about new materialism; and third, to explore underrealized constructive resources posed by thinking with new animism and the closely related ontological turn in anthropology that can help scholars of religion engage difference without resorting to belief-talk.