The Mobility of Religion
Project leader: Ismail Fajrie Alatas
This project seeks to chart the travel of religion — particularly Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam — across historical and contemporary Asia. It endeavors to trace the ongoing reproduction of religions in and through complex mobilities, exchange, and interconnections that generate contact, mixture, and linkages. Whether through textual circulation, pilgrimage, diaspora formation, traveling scholars, missionaries, and students, or conquest and holy wars, the project follows the movement and modulation of religious bodies, ideas, and practices through diverse circuits of mobility and networks that connect different parts of Asia and beyond. Foregrounding regional and trans-regional mobility, the project attempts to reveal issues of translation, mobilization, collaboration, competition, and conflict that continue to give Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam their particular content and force. More than just outcomes of shifting circuits of mobility and interaction, however, Mobility of Religion is also interested in situating religion as a discursive and symbolic resource that may help historical and contemporary actors postulate moral shape to the regional and trans-regional space they inhabit and traverse.