Mobility, Relationality, and the Decolonizing of Religious Studies: A Response to the Special Issue

Abstract

This response to the special issue synthesizes its contributions into an argument for disaggregating mobility and modernity. Indigenous modes of physical and religious mobility put the lie to conventional constructions of indigenous peoples, including academic constructions of indigenous religions, as stuck in place and stuck in time. This special issue offers a profound critique of religious studies and of all hegemonic paradigms that associate civilization with sedentarization, movement with domination, reality with rationality, and truth with transcendence.

Keywords: :

• Indigenous religions
• mobility
• relationality
• decolonization.

Notes

1 This is a near-universal experience, even for those physically disabled who may not be able to walk but who nevertheless seek and increasingly have available to them technological enhancements for retaining mobility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Devaka Premawardhana

Devaka Premawardhana is associate professor of religion at Emory University. His first book, Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique, explores the ambiguities of religious change among a traditionally mobile people. It contests the widely assumed narrative of a worldwide Pentecostal “explosion,” doing so on the grounds that indigenous religions often remain vibrant and influential—even in the lives of converts.

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