ABSTRACT
Missionaries are people committed to the notion of the portability of religion: they 'have Faith, will travel'. In what follows I want to explore the encounter between sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan missionaries and the pagan Aztecs of Mexico, to see how viable that notion of portability is. First I will sketch the implicit model of religious change the Franciscans worked from, and then investigate the defects of that model through an analysis of what the missionaries actually achieved, and their confusions about it. Finally I want to draw out from this particular example some propositions of a more general kind about the relationship between the cluster of sentiments, actions and understandings touched by the sacred that we call 'religion', and the larger and more inclusive cluster of sentiments, actions and understandings we call 'society'.
