Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Prologue: Ethnomusicology, Secularity, Agency is the author’s assessment of ethnomusicology’s past encounters with religion and intuitions about religion in its futures. For most of its history, ethnomusicology has been a secular discipline, operating according to methodological atheism (gods, spirits, demons, and deities are not real) or agnosticism (they are unknowable). This means that human beings are the sole agents in conventional ethnomusicological work on religion. More recently, nonsecular methods have become important in the field, with ethnomusicologists recognizing the agency of other-than-human beings and the knowledge available in sonic theologies. This shift has forced a reckoning with the discipline’s secularity and its historical exclusion of scholars working in nonsecular, theologically informed ways. After describing his position as an ethnographer of music and religion, the author invites readers to reconsider the discipline’s canons and dominant methods in light of the decolonial, antiracist futures emerging through sonic relationships of human and other-than-human agents in scholarship.</jats:p>