Religion, Mobility and Conflict

In 2004 Stephen Greenblatt noted that apart from “significant and well-circumscribed exceptions,” the Humanities and Social Sciences have inherited “a strong assumption of rootedness as the norm of human culture…Many of the established conceptual tools for cultural analysis take for granted the fixity of the objects of study or at least assume that in their original or natural state, before contamination, the proper objects of study are stable and motionless.” ¹ This assumption certainly guided the founding of the discipline of comparative religion, despite its being afforded by data collected by mobile colonial administrators and missionaries. The discipline of comparative religion rendered the “world religions” as discrete bounded entities centred on texts, the marginal outliers of which were branded, disparagingly, as “syncretistic.” Of course, such an assumption serves well the discipline of knowledge gathering. How might one execute due diligence on a moving target? And if it is all flux, if one cannot step into the same river twice, then our descriptions are neither adequate nor authoritative. Academic credibility would seem to be dependent upon the stability of objects and intact boundaries. But Greenblatt spies a more nefarious history behind the academic assumption of rootedness. He argues that the bureaucratization of modern universities “conjoined with a nasty intensification of ethnocentrism, racism and nationalism produced the temporary illusion of sedentary, indigenous literary cultures…The reality, for most of the past as once again for the present, is more about nomads than natives.” ² Consequently, Greenblatt urges scholars to embrace mobility as “the constitutive condition of culture and not its disruption.” Indeed, he proposes that we refer to this new cross-disciplinary enterprise as “mobility studies.” ³