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.