Futile Plans:Map, Wandering, and the Study of Religion

Abstract

Sometimes, plans fail. I had planned to write about how Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging spoke to the study of religion in various ways. But after encountering Map’s speaker on the ocean with Yemaya, my plans failed, and opened a different way of thinking about religion and its study. In this regard, this essay speaks to religion not as a category of human experience, but instead as a kind of movement that sets our categories in default. Turning to scholars of religion like Charles Long and Black studies scholars like Sarah Jane Cervenak, I eventually suggest that Map offers us wandering as a method for studying religion; instead of coming with our received categories, I suggest, we must instead adopt wandering as a method; instead of starting with traditions, beliefs, theologies and histories, we should instead insist on life—and allow that insistence to guide our study.