Introduction

Abstract

AbstractAlthough studies on the entwining of religious and economic forms in the discipline of religious studies have typically centered on Euro-American contexts, this roundtable offers multiple points of departure for analyzing religion and economy in four national contexts outside the West. Debates about the relationships between morality, sacred histories, market governance, and financial cultures have different terms and stakes outside of Western concentrations of capital. The ideologies of freedom and personal autonomy that underpin neoliberalism are inflected quite differently in contexts and intellectual traditions with both colonial and socialist histories. This is true not only for trenchant critics of neoliberalism but also for those actors who provocatively assert freedom through the market. By de-centering the West as the starting point for understanding neoliberal capitalism, we are better able to see the ways that colonial and imperial power is experienced across the globe and how it bears out in diverse neoliberal cultural formations.