Conceptual Colonialism

As some readers may know, my academic background is in philosophy, and I have kept up my subscriptions to a couple of journals. I have recently read an interesting article in one of them, “Conceptual Decolonization, Conceptual Justice, and Religious Concepts”, by Mikel Burley (Mind 134:533 (2025) 60–84).

The idea of “conceptual colonisation” is that the coloniser brings their own set of concepts for organising the world, and imposes them on the colonised. Thus, if the coloniser describes something as “superstition”, the colonised are unable to defend it, because how can you defend a superstition? You would have to redescribe it as something valuable, and that is something that you cannot do, because the coloniser controls the concepts. After a generation, even the colonised think of that practice as “superstition”, and thus regard it as without value. “Conceptual decolonisation” and “conceptual justice” are concerned with avoiding or rectifying this problem.

The article explains the basic principles, and then uses religious concepts to discuss how the idea can be used. A central example is Kwasi Wiredu’s claim that the traditional beliefs about “extra-human beings” of the Akan of Ghana are described as “religious”, but that this is incorrect, because these beliefs are utilitarian — concerned with bargaining with the spirits for benefits. Wiredu goes on to criticise some African thinkers for using “religion”, and other western concepts, to describe these practices, even though they are inappropriate. Burley’s position is that Wiredu has an important point, but appears to be taking too narrow a definition of the western concepts.

It should be obvious why I found this interesting: the question of whether Shinto is helpfully described as a religion is one that I have to grapple with all the time. Japan has never technically been colonised (the Occupation was not colonial — the Japanese were still in charge, as long as they did as they were told), but the influence of western cultural imperialism is obvious, and there is a general issue of how we can engage with a genuinely different culture even when there is no colonisation or imperialism going on.

On the one hand, there is a problem here. It is wrong to insist on a yes-or-no answer to the question “Is Shinto a religion?”. The concept of “religion” was developed in a different culture, and it does not apply at all well to Japanese society. Similarly, it is always misleading to translate “kami”, because there is no concept for them in English-speaking countries, and thus all English words get something wrong.

This works in both directions, of course. It is difficult to describe Christian concepts in Japanese terms. The sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries took this problem seriously, and developed new words for “God”, for example. (“Tenshu”, “Heavenly Lord”, for example.) They also encouraged all churches to build tea rooms, because the tea ceremony provided a valuable way to overcome social rank. I would be inclined to say that the Jesuits were not conceptually imperialist, even if they could certainly be described as culturally imperialist (and, possibly, just imperialist).

On the other hand, I think it can be very valuable to try to express a conceptual system in another language, particularly one that is not well-suited to it. Precisely because you do not have access to words for the concepts, you have to think about what, exactly, the concepts are. If you have a convenient word for something, it is very easy to not think about that thing carefully. Once you have to translate the idea into a very different language, however, you might well realise that you do not understand it as well as you thought.

This is a reason to be dubious about the idea that a culture can only be understood in the language of that culture. It is easy to talk and think about Shinto in Japanese. But that means that it is also easy to avoid having a deep understanding of it. (See, for example, most Japanese people.) On the other hand, it is hard to talk and think about Shinto in English, but if you make the effort, I think you can reach a genuine understanding. And even if you have a deep understanding in Japanese, the attempt to explain something in English might make you realise that there were still aspects you were not really clear about.

A particular language, I think, makes it easy to use certain concepts and think in certain ways, and hard to use other concepts or take other approaches. But I do not think any language makes it impossible to grasp any concept — and sometimes it is valuable to do things the hard way.