KARIN VÉLEZ, SEBASTIAN R. PRANGE, AND LUKE CLOSSEY
What moves in world history? Armies, slaves and migrants, technologies, commodities and capital, plants, animals and microbes all have journeys neatly mapped out in world history textbooks. Ideas are entangled with each of these roving facets of human experience, but their itineraries are more difficult to chart. Consider Islam, for instance. Older textbooks almost always include confident maps that represent the spread of Islam through boldly swung arrows that point outwards from Mecca in all directions. These vectors are plotted along the routes of conquest and commerce, with the sites of battles and ports of trade as their coordinates. Convenient and conventional as it is, this linking of the movement of ideas with that of more tangible changes and exchanges has its pitfalls. It hinges on a facile trope of diffusion whereby one place, a core, supplies a pure and intact notion to another place, a periphery, that passively receives it. It also conceals the need to ask how ideas traveled in practice and how, in turn, their movement affected the ideas themselves. In the case of Islam, focusing attention on how the tenets of this faith were transported calls into question the simple conflation of the spread of Islam with the political expansion of the caliphate.
The transit of ideas can rarely be adequately represented by unidirectional arrows. Ideas in motion are more meaningfully visualized as multiple ouroboric circuits that are continuously rearticulated and reshaped. The complicated dynamics of their journeys are what make them both difficult and useful as modes of analysis. One must address the multiplicity of ways in which ideas interlock and transfer. They travel in hearts and minds, prayers and practices, books and stories, and artifacts both artistic and everyday. As ideas move through time and space, they expand, collide, are contested, or collapse. They arrive in one form and soon take flight in another, with variations between new and old often difficult to discern. Acknowledging the fantastic mobility, permeability and connectivity of ideas is the first step towards comprehending their global reach.
World historians are showing a growing interest in the circulation of scientific, artistic, and religious thought across the planet. This chapter focuses primarily on ideas that are religious in nature.1 In part this is because of its authors’ particular interests, but there are less omphaloskeptical reasons to shine the spotlight on religion when considering ideas in motion. Among all global modes of thought (Anschauungen), religious ideas have arguably traveled the farthest and lasted the longest. This scope and longevity may be rooted in the unapologetic intent found in many religious traditions to have their ideas move and be moved. Religious ideas are usually conceived and presented with the explicit purpose of transforming the beliefs – and consequently the lives – of many people. This is most evident in the commission in some religions to proselytize. Religious ideas are also worthy of our attention because of the importance religion attains as it is lived and the extent to which it permeates so many aspects of life from birth to death (and, according to most religions, also thereafter). For this reason, the engagement with religious ideas can give substance to some startling analogies. We might, for instance, compare current commitments to secularism to earlier religious doctrines, or examine the global dissemination of the scientific worldview (and, at times, the fervor of its proponents) in light of the transplantation of religions. Over the last century, science itself has expanded to become the dominant creed of the modern age, allowing it to share in the historically insidious mobility of religion. Akin to the manner in which, say, medieval Christians took it for granted that religious icons could move of their own volition, science is nowadays widely regarded as a universal truth that exists in a timeless, all-encompassing sphere autonomous of human intervention. We offer this survey of recent scholarship of religious ideas in motion with an eye for such analogies.2 Cumulatively, the works described below demonstrate the value of historicizing the movement of all types of ideas, and highlight the potential benefits of studying them in the context of global patterns of exchange, social networks, and human agency.3
As world historians, we are committed to considering the big picture and the long term. When it comes to religions, however, this macrohistorical approach often translates into studying them as organized systems of thought (or orthodoxies) that render their followers as identifiable groups through shared norms and behaviors. From this broad perspective, we risk losing sight of an essential aspect of religion that distinguishes it from mere philosophy or ideology: its adherents’ faith in a spiritual realm or deity that accounts for, and lends meaning to, human existence. Historically, the movement of ideas derived much of its motivation and momentum from such personal conviction, or what sociologists term “religiosity.” While religion is often practiced in communal and performative ways, it is ultimately vested in a personal commitment to certain beliefs about history, human nature, and the cosmos. At the same time, it is important to remind ourselves that the assumption of an invariable, deep-rooted spiritual dimension to everyday life in the past is no less essentialist – and erroneous – than the projection of an unwaveringly rational, Laodicean post-Enlightenment individual. Such an approach risks forever positing the “religious” premodern as inherently irrational and, therefore, effectively unknowable. Moreover, adherents to a common faith do not necessarily understand or articulate their beliefs in the same way. Religious ideas, then, are on the one hand inherently personal, while on the other hand their acquisition, transmission, and articulation are necessarily shaped by social, economic, and political contexts. As a result, it is always problematic to generalize about the wider historical resonance of religious ideas. They undoubtedly suffuse the worldly experience of many people, past and present, but they may not be in themselves the key to understanding it.
There is a further obstacle to reconciling the acculturation of religious ideas with their personal and confidential (in the word’s original sense of “fully trusting”) quality. The world historian of religion is also confronted with the challenge of meaningful classification. The most general categories into which religions are conventionally grouped are “world” and “primal.”4 “World” religions are characterized by written scripture, the notion of salvation, and a universal mandate, whereas “primal” religions are defined by the opposite qualities of oral transmission, a focus on mundane existence, and an identification with a specific ethnic group or territory. As a result of this contradistinction, those belief systems that have not been reified into “world” religions are often treated as perennially “traditional,” as stuck in time and place and largely unresponsive to the great currents of world history. (See the chapters by Yoffee and by Pomeranz and Segal, this volume.)“World” religions are assumed to move more or less intact; “traditional” religions are held not to move at all. This categorization does not do justice to either grouping. For “primal” religions, whether described as shaman, animist, totemic or pagan, the blanket category fails to grasp the vast range of religious ideas that have marked the last 250,000 years of human history, with an astounding diversity of religious artifacts and spiritual rituals.5 The same shortfall presents itself with regard to “world” religion. In recent years, for example, the field of Indian religious history has been abuzz with studies describing the multitude of local and temporal variants of the Hindu tradition, thereby challenging the notion of one coherent and continuous pan-Indian Hinduism (Saberwal and Varma 2005). Such rebuttals to the notion of stable, perduring, monolithic religions alert us to the historical complexities not only of individual but also of collective religious identities.
These formidable challenges in studying religion from a world-historical perspective are, in our view, more than offset by the immense promise this endeavor holds. Historians who are currently studying religion-in-motion are leading the charge to understand how ideas of all types can go global. In this chapter, we flag some of their most innovative contributions over the past decade or so. The most noteworthy trend among these scholars is their insistence on broadening the geographic frame of analysis. They also explore the portability of sacred intangibles like space and belief, the networks of people who carry religion far afield, negotiations and reverberations between the local and the global, and the latest encroachments of religious ideas in modern life. This selective overview of recent English-language scholarship bearing on the world history of religious ideas is not intended to be comprehensive or representative. For instance, we deliberately present Christianity-centered works alongside those focused on other religions. This is to compensate for the lingering academic emphasis on Western-prescribed Christianity as the defining example of a world religion (Lindenfeld 2007; Sinitiere 2007). In this small way, our brief survey stands as an exercise in the new, adamantly world-historical arena of religious studies.
The Call for a Global Frame
The intensified call to action for researchers to consider religion in the context of the wider world has prompted study of how religious ideas spread and travel between regions. The plea for global perspective has come from several quarters. Among the most vocal are historians of the early modern Catholic Church. Simon Ditchfield (2004) has sharply articulated the need to reconfigure studies of Catholicism to show the interdependency and conciliation between Catholic Church administrators in Rome and local practitioners. In “A Catholic Atlantic,” Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills – historians of French North America and Spanish South America respectively – second this move by calling attention to the “dialectical relationship” between European promoters of Catholicism and the “reconfiguring recipients” of the religion in the Americas (2007: 13). Europe is not jettisoned or decentered in the approach these scholars advocate. Rather, the sphere of religious interaction is widened to span the Atlantic and the world. Discussions of religious ideas beyond the halls of the Roman papacy are shown to matter deeply, and to reshape the whole.
Outside the discipline of history, too, there has also been interest in the push-and-pull between authorities and lived practice, as played out on a global stage. Social anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has put forward a cognitive theory of religion based on his fieldwork on a “cargo cult” in Papua New Guinea in the 1990s. Whitehouse (2000) proposes two mixed modes of religiosity, one “doctrinal,” counterintuitive and centrally managed, the other “imagistic,” ritual-based and intuitive. His separation of modes has provoked a flurry of debate over religions as chronologically disparate as early antique Mithraism and the nineteenth-century Lutheran revivalist movements in Finland (Whitehouse and Martin 2004). Like Ditchfield, Greer, and Mills, Whitehouse wants to understand religion’s appeal, or what allows it to transcend place and time. This includes both fixed teachings and flexibility on the ground.
In his survey of textbooks on the history of religion, David Lindenfeld (2007) notes that their narratives still take as normative the lossless transmission of text-based teachings. This preoccupation with texts privileges faiths with strong scriptural traditions – an attitude encapsulated in one such text, the Qur‘an, that accords special status to Jews and Christians as “people of the book.” It also tends to emphasize the opinions and experiences of a small scholarly elite that defined and disputed these texts in writing. This tendency is especially pronounced because a scriptural religion typically finds early expression and elaboration in one particular language: for instance, Sanskrit for Hinduism, Latin for Catholicism, and Arabic for Islam. These languages themselves came to be regarded as sacred, and command of them became not only a status marker but often a necessary standard for explicating social and political dictums. In The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), Sheldon Pollock describes how Sanskrit became transformed from a purely religious language into a medium for literary and political expression that tied elites across much of southern Asia into a “Sanskrit cosmopolis.” Even though most scriptural religions eventually underwent a process of vernacularization, historians of Hinduism, Catholicism or Islam are still most likely to be trained in these traditions’ dominant languages and therefore to pay greater attention to discourses written in them.
Phillip Sinitiere exhorts world historians to temper this bias by choosing a different index, by looking at the “translatability and indigenization” of world religions rather than their universalistic clamor (2007: 13). Vernacularization and translation are not simply the transfer of a stable set of meanings into new idioms but authorial acts: to translate is to create anew. (See Northrop, final chapter in this volume.) For example, the emergence of Persian as the political language of Islam in much of the eastern Islamic world “acted as a potent agent of assimilation” in which multiple meanings could emerge, compete, and coexist (Alam 2004: 142).6 Increasingly historians recognize that ideas might move best and farthest when they are not the sole province or static purveyance of any one group. Studying religions from the perspective of mobility, at moments of transference and translation that enabled their global reach, highlights change, not constancy, as a key feature of religious ideas in world history. In short, it is not enough to set a wider scope and to note the presence of a religious idea in multiple places in the world; we should also ask how it has been altered to have resonance in new settings and how this transmutation, in turn, affected these religious traditions as a whole.
Space and Beliefs in Motion
There is an immediate challenge posed by this double quest to assess the extent of a religious idea’s global presence as well as its variability: how do we track an idea on the move? Trevor Johnson (1996) has done so by tying ideas to transient objects. His study of the seventeenth-century relic trade in bones, exhumed from Christian catacombs in Italy and shipped north to Bavaria, demonstrates how sacred identities of saints were mapped onto tangible and transferable items. (See Levi, this volume.) More recently, scholars have trailed sacred articles whose portability is not so immediately obvious: namely, temples. Joanne Punzo Waghorne charts how the Hindu urban middle class replicated sacred space in London and Washington DC in the 1960s, and long before then in Chennai (Madras) in the 1640s. Waghorne describes the “conservative creativity” these displaced Hindus employed to create new sites for communal worship (2004: 34). Jualynne Dodson looks at the variety of altars assembled by practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religions of Palo Monte, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. She too detaches sacred spaces from specific landscapes to redefine them as “constructed assemblages of shared awareness” (2008: 62). Johnson, Waghorne, and Dodson each track circumforaneous objects to show how religious ideas are shifted and renovated.
Stuart Schwartz set himself the even more audacious task of pursuing religious ideas along the trajectory of a concept rather than through the itinerary of an object. In All Can Be Saved, he considers how the amorphous notion of religious tolerance traversed and persisted within the Iberian Atlantic world during the centuries of the dreaded Inquisition. Schwartz trails the ideas of tolerance and salvation as they surface in a repeated refrain, “Each person can be saved by his or her own religion” (2008: 1). This phrase was mustered as a defense by ordinary Iberians arrested by Inquisition courts in Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Colombia between 1500 and 1700. Schwartz is able to trace the concept of tolerance across much of the world because of its durability in a particular genre of legal documents. Charles Keyes (2007) also follows a recurring idea – violence – among practitioners of Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos over the last 23 centuries. He demonstrates how the rise of Buddhist nationalism and fundamentalism embroiled Buddhists in the politics of their different countries and led to the intrusion of an aberrant idea, violence, into the Buddhist religious sphere. Keyes thus follows corpses while Schwartz follows words. Both are interested in how local politics activate a charged concept – be it tolerance or violence – and cause it to take hold with a particular religious group of people. Movement, for these writers, is chronological, evidenced in a latent and enduring idea being passed like a baton to fresh runners.
Networks of Carriers
Other historians are just as curious about the people who carried religious ideas as about the ideas themselves. What united these carriers and helped them succeed in broadcasting their faith? Francesca Trivellato (2009) argues that carefully cultivated trust, not kinship or religion, was what held together the trade diaspora of Sephardic Jewish merchants in the early modern era. Sebastian Prange (2009) returns to the importance of religion as a link for Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean, whose contributions to spreading Islam are often overlooked. Alongside traders, Muslim spiritual orders known as Sufi brotherhoods played a key role in the propagation of Islam across much of Asia. In the case of India, their study reveals the remarkable degree to which individual saints were revered by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and, at times, Christians alike (Ernst and Lawrence 2002). Anthropologist Pnina Werbner (2003) describes this phenomenon in the contemporary period, using the example of a Sufi cult centered on a living saint from northwestern Pakistan that extends globally to Europe, the Middle East, and Southern Africa. Looking at another set of missionaries, the Catholic Society of Jesus, Luke Clossey (2008) shows that when studied from a world-historical perspective, even professional messengers of religious ideas like the Jesuits emerge not as a centrally directed order but as interconnected (and often unmediated) regional networks whose currencies were relics and hard coin as much as doctrine and a shared desire to save souls. Clossey, Prange, and Trivellato overturn the stereotype of a lone missionary or remote merchant carting his beliefs overseas by highlighting the role of solid but imperfect networks tied together by movement and faith.
Some of the more neglected networks of religious conveyors to be brought to light recently are composed of women. (See Burton, this volume.) M. Whitney Kelting (2001) has analyzed the stavan songs of a group of Jain women and found that women used these songs as a public forum for theologizing and commenting on religion. The negotiation and leadership that Kelting witnessed among Jain women in the 1990s has also been noted by Haruko Narata Ward (2009) among Japanese female converts to Catholicism in the 1600s. Ward compares early modern Shinto-Buddhist and Christian beliefs to consider the unique benefits each afforded to Japanese women in particular situations. She also observes how Japanese women converts acted as teachers and catechists alongside Portuguese Jesuits. Aviva Ben-Ur (2009) also focuses on the interface between women and male religious leaders in early modern Suriname. There, mulatto daughters of Jewish landowners were assigned a second-class status but nonetheless found ways to contribute to Suriname’s Jewish community. Writing of a more recent century, Tayba Sharif (2005) reports on how Iraqi Shiite women thrown together in refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and then in the Netherlands worked through their grief collectively in lamentation sessions to commemorate Zaynab, a granddaughter of the prophet Muhammad. They used sacred narrative to connect themselves and their experiences with their foremothers, and to support each other. These informal religious associations between women show that “networks [can] free individuals. They are more affiliative than filiative” (Belghazi 2005: 277).
Several recent studies have endeavored to show individuals, whether women or men, maneuvering between or outside of networks. Jon Sensbach (2005) tells the story of Rebecca Protten, a slave on the Danish island of St Thomas who converted to Protestantism, joining the Moravian Brethren and preaching to fellow slaves, and eventually traveling to Europe and Africa. Natalie Zemon Davis (2006) describes the African and European journeys of the Muslim al-Hasan al-Wazzan. His capture by Mediterranean pirates and captivity in Rome led him to convert to Catholicism and become a protégé of the pope, only to return later in his life to Muslim North Africa. Sensbach and Davis call attention to larger political and economic forces acting upon individuals and pushing them towards one religion or another. Remarkably, these individuals – like the networks they skirted between – united mobility and faith. The movement of religious ideas around them bumped them onto new life paths.
Negotiations and Reverberations
In attempting to describe the lives of individuals like Protten or al-Wazzan, who lived in zones of intense religious contact, many scholars are wary of using terms with historically negative connotations such as pure “orthodoxy” versus muddied “syncretism.” Still, there is a need to describe the dynamics of encounter between the contesting and neighboring apples and oranges we lump together as “religions.” Michael Carrithers (2000) offers the term “polytropy,” or “spiritual cosmopolitanism,” as an alternative to explain an experience of the Digambar Jain in South Asia. In contrast to the monopoly some traditions insist upon, the notion of polytropy seeks to describe situations in which people appropriate and combine elements from (seemingly) discrete religious traditions. In a similar vein, Nicolas Standaert (2008) asks how a missionary credal religion adapted to a polytropic society. His examination of Christian burial rites in seventeenth-century China shows that intercultural contact brought together European and Chinese forms of religiosity, giving rise to new, hybrid religious identities. Focus on ritual, local faiths, and lived religion has recently become a popular way to look at the overlap of religious practices. Jennifer Scheper Hughes (2010) tells of the lived religion that sprang up among Catholics of Mexico around the cross of the Cristo Aparecido. After its discovery in the 1540s, this cross took on a multiplicity of meanings, ranging from a friar’s early (and unpopular) claim that it symbolized human sinfulness, to a sense of local ownership by recently converted Indians of Totolapan. These conflicting meanings came to a head in the 1580s, when Augustinian friars and Indian Christians of Mexico City together witnessed the cross coming to life. Shared experience obscured the lines between Christian miracle and Indian animism, combining the different strands of meaning for the object and thereby multiplying its resonance.
Often it is not old and new religions that need to be reconciled locally, but textual authorities and ritual practitioners. Although designed to stifle contrarian religious ideas, prescriptions and persecutions by priests, shamans, brahmans, mullahs, popes or rabbis frequently served to propel the dissemination of supposed heresies, sometimes along unexpected routes. The complex (and largely peaceful) processes by which Zoroastrian Iran became an Islamic territory, for example, not only engendered the establishment of a sizable Zoroastrian diaspora in India but also had profound effects on Islam itself: in the words of one expert, the “Islamic conquest of Iran was counterbalanced by the Iranian conquest of Islam.” (Stausberg 2008: 581). Harjot Oberoi (1994) identifies such transformations born of tension in the early development of the Sikh religion. First, he describes how Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam did not begin as well-demarcated units of religious identity. The early days of Sikhism were marked by recognition of multiple, competing forms of ritual practice drawn from many traditions. Only later, in the late 1800s with the emergence of the Singh Sabha movement among the Sikhs and the administrative consolidation of the British Raj, did the category of Sikh become reified from within and without.7
Oberoi’s provocative argument is partly couched in a regional distinction between South Asia and Europe, with South Asia as a realm of religious pluralism and Europe (and the wider Christian West) as the domain of monolithic and centralized religion. However, William Taylor’s (2005) study of two competing shrines in colonial Mexico calls such regional characterizations into question by describing a different sort of interplay between text and practice in a Christian sphere, also at a late consolidating moment like Oberoi’s. Taylor uncovers a case of crossed claims over a miracle-working relic, the large crucifix of the Cristo Renovado. In 1623, the cross was removed from Mapethé, a small mining community near Mexico City, and taken to the capital for safe-keeping. Sixty years later, a priest wrote a history of the relic’s translation to Mexico City, which was read by Otomí Indians from Mapethé. In the 1740s, a full century after the Cristo Renovado was relocated, Otomí leaders renovated the church at Mapethé and petitioned that the relic be returned to them. Their request was not granted, but Mapethé began to draw pilgrims in its own right as the original home of the Cristo Renovado. Here, textual authority inadvertently blurred and extended categories of ritual ownership rather than ossifying them. Faith fractured and multiplied across two centers instead of becoming pinned on one.
Another fascinating global dynamic becomes evident when internal religious negotiations are stretched out over continents and oceans rather than playing out in a single location. What happens when a “local faith” revisits its ancient cradle? Returns are the crowning flourish of the mobile. There have been several recent studies on new recipients of a religion reaching back to reconnect with old donors in unanticipated ways. Toni Huber (2008) considers how Buddhists in Tibet have reinvented India as the birthplace of their religion. Through pilgrimage and exile, modern Tibetans have reenvisioned India’s sacred geography around themselves. Similarly, Karin Vélez (2011) writes on the Catholic Huron of the Jesuit mission of Lorette who sent gifts across the Atlantic Ocean to their namesake Italian shrine of Loreto and to several other Catholic sanctuaries. The shared name of Lorette inspired the Huron neophytes to approach European and American religious sites as fellow Catholics.
One of the greatest annual movements inspired by religious devotion is the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca all able Muslims are urged to perform at least once in their lifetime. For over 1,300 years, the hajj has brought together Muslims from all corners of the world, generating a regular, multitudinous exchange of ideas (as well as texts, goods, and diseases) that reached far beyond the purely religious. Michael Pearson’s (1996) study of the hajj from India during the early-modern period, for instance, highlights the centrality not so much of its destination, Mecca, but of the pilgrimage itself in routinely connecting Muslims across the Indian Ocean world. Also focusing on the Indian Ocean, Engseng Ho considers how inherited names preserved in genealogies created a sense of connection between the dispersed Muslims from the Hadhramawt region in Yemen. These names tied people to graves back in Tarim to which some of them returned on pilgrimage. The process of the Hadhrami diaspora making a circuit outwards and back home again is held up by Ho as an example of how “the idea of mobility becomes an interpretive key” (2006: xxv, 29). Indeed, the reverberations caused by returns challenge our sense of how and where religions are defined, and by whom. Instead of being laid out in one heartland by controlling elites, in these works religions appear to form and reform on the road, on the fly, at the hands of drifters in active transit around the world.8
New Spheres for Religion
An old adage identifies the two most common plots of fiction: someone goes on a long journey, and a stranger comes to town. The global history of religion is taking shape along similar storylines. Some historians stake out ports and crossroads, to wait for the ideas to come to them. Others stalk their prey across all borders, breaking with the old custom of ending the chase at a coastline or national border, like a sheriff helplessly watching outlaws escape into a neighboring jurisdiction. Persisting in the pursuit sometimes creates odd geographical units of analysis: Clossey’s 2008 study of Jesuit networks between the Holy Roman Empire, Ming China, and Spanish Mesoamerica is likely the first (and just as likely the last) work of Sino-Germano-Mexican history. At times historians can take advantage of contemporary geopolitics to work within more coherent, but no less vast, geographical boundaries, as Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden do in their project on angels and demons in the colonial Hispanic world (forthcoming). Those historians working within the broad geographies of expanding civilizational languages – Greek and Latin, Persian and Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese, to name a few – have increasingly taken care to balance the wealth of documents in the expansive language with the scanter and often more difficult indigenous sources, which often require painstaking discovery and reconstruction (e.g. Burkhart 2001).
Some mobile ideas wind up in places so unexpected that their movement causes us to rethink the stability even of geographies traditionally thought least permeable. Brandon Marriott, for instance, traces millenarian ideas from Jewish pens in the Ottoman empire into the minds and hearts of Puritans in the British Atlantic World; here Jews and Christians think from the same fountain (Marriott forthcoming). Studies like his problematize the conventional demarcations not only of Judaism and Christendom but also of European Enlightenment. It was during this period of European intellectual history, amidst such unexpected circumambulations of religious ideas across an expanding world, that religion came to be conceived as the primitive counterpart to modern reason. As scholars from different disciplines have rightly pointed out, this hugely pervasive discourse requires us to properly historicize the epistemological category of religion itself in both research and teaching (e.g. Kippenberg 2002).
The recasting of religious thought in terms of mobility begs the question of where religion will move to next. Some promising recent work has been done on the impact of the internet and mass technology on Islam. Carl Ernst (2005) has studied how the technologies of printing and recording have made previously secret classical Sufi texts widely available, even to non-Muslim and foreign consumers. This shift has eroded the traditional Sufi hierarchy of authority. H. Samy Alim is beginning to look at how Muslim hip-hop artists and pop stars are positioning themselves as “the most cutting-edge conveyors of contemporary Islam” (2005: 272). Jonathan James (2010) describes the phenomenon of Hindu televangelism in contemporary India and its surprising linkages to a globalized brand of Charismatic Christianity. The presence of religious ideas at the forefront of globe-reaching initiatives like music, satellite television, and the world wide web is neither surprising nor novel. At a similar moment of technological acceleration in the nineteenth century, thousands of ordinary Christian laypeople linked themselves to popular science, for instance, frequenting lectures on astronomy, anatomy, alchemy, and geology (Numbers 1997).
Thus we come full circle to where we began, adrift in a planet-spanning sphere of ideas in motion, with science, art and religion as peripatetic bunkmates. It becomes clear that religion is not the static antagonist of a mobile modernity, but rather a transformative vector crisscrossing through world history. Might we go so far as to claim that within the ricocheting trajectories of religious ideas, world historians can find one of their strongest mandates to justify studying the past in its global dimensions? We believe so. Religious ideas motivated immense journeys and pilgrimages, fueled contacts and conquests, and even propelled some faithful onto heroic quests or fool’s errands of global proportions. Members of religious communities may be regarded as “the oldest of the transnationals: Sufi orders, Catholic missionaries, and Buddhist monks carried word and praxis across vast spaces before those places became nation-states or even states” (Rudolph 1997: 1). Religious ideas in motion are closely intertwined with global dynamics that world historians study – be they commerce, migration, diaspora, imperialism, capitalism, or any other outlined in this volume – and in many instances exemplify the state of the art in world history methodology.
Amidst this blaze of discovery and reconfiguration, it behooves us to momentarily look beyond this spotlight on mobility to ask whether we, and perhaps world historians in general, have been too intent on identifying and tracing ideas that were transmitted, transported and transformed translocally, while neglecting those that refused such processes. For instance, it has been said that if the great panoply of indigenously sub-Saharan religious ideas that are conventionally subsumed under the umbrella term “animism” all share one single characteristic, it is their “almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits” (Garuba 2003: 267, emphasis added).9 Studying religious ideas from the vantage point of world history means not only to demarcate their reach but also to emplace them in differing everyday spaces.10 Along with the great insights we gain from the emergent world history of religious ideas that is beginning to displace the staid history of “world” religions, we must remember that ostensibly global exchanges and trends were – and, arguably, continue to be – both self-selective and selectively exclusionary. In this aspect too, then, studying religious ideas mirrors the wider challenges that world history faces as a field: to reconcile the personal with the collective, transformative moments with long-term trends, agency with structure, the local with the global. Were this chapter to submit anything resembling a dogma, it would be a profession of faith that persisting in this endeavor is both wise and good.
Notes
1 For examples of diverse global approaches to the history of science, see Bala (2006), Joseph (2000), Safier (2008), Scharfstein (1998).
2 The authors note that the study of religious ideas in motion, surveyed here as part of a section on “Connecting,” is only one of many current world-historical approaches to religion. One might attempt comparison, as in Sharot (2001), or focus on rupture and splintering, as does Wellman (2007).
3 With regard to agency, we suggest that religious ideas do not (solely) exist in some ethereal realm that people tapped into at different times and in different places, but that their effectuation and transmission are contingent historical processes. It is contingency, not credo, that we believe inquod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus (everywhere, always, and by everyone), to revise St Vincent of Lérin’s famed expression of the eternal nature of Catholic doctrine.
4 The category of “primal” (at times expressed in terms of “traditional,” “archaic,” “indigenous,” or “tribal”) is nowadays seen as less objectionable than the older designation of “primitive”; unchanged, however, is the connotation of an evolutionary stuntedness in comparison to more “advanced” (or “scriptural,” “modern,” “world”) religions.
5 The scarcity of evidence for the prehistoric period allows scholars to use what few sources that do exist as inkblot diagrams on which to project their own assumptions and anxieties. Whether this is religion at all is not entirely clear. For a responsible treatment, see Insoll (2004).
6 The intermingling of religious and imperial projects in the early modern world was, of course, not limited to the Mughals but a remarkably widespread feature of the period; see Clossey (2007).
7 Oberoi’s work raises further questions about what happens when scholarship reaches a wider public. For a discussion of this issue see Barton and James (2010), and Witz, this volume.
8 Other recent studies of pilgrimage include Kaufman (2005) and Stopford (1999).
9 For a discussion of the global spread of the apparently non-global Yoruba religion to Brazil, Cuba, and elsewhere in the Americas during the nineteenth century as a consequence of the slave trade, see Manning (2009: 173–175.) (Also see Gerritsen, this volume.)
10 Other disciplines grapple with similar methodological challenges of unifying global religious phenomena with their highly localized manifestations; see for instance Vásquez (2008).
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