ABSTRACT

The transnationalism of religion is intimately related to processes of deterritorialization, which figure prominently in the work of Olivier Roy. This also has implications for the religious identity of ‘true believers’, since Roy notes that there has been a ‘shift from self-evident universal religions embedded in given cultures, to religious communities surrounded by secularised societies’. Similar occurrences of religious hybridization have long attracted the attention of scholars specialized in different traditions. In this respect, one of the earliest examples is offered by Inoue Nobutaka’s work on religion in Japan, which initially focused on the phenomenon of ‘neo-syncretism’, and, more recently, on the category of ‘hyper-religions’. Based on a working definition of religion revolving around the concept of authority, and the idea of two main sources of relativization, Dessì contends that religion can be relativized by the authority of other religious systems, by religious/non-religious elements circulating in the global cultural network, and by the authority of other social systems.