ABSTRACT
Religion is somewhat like language in that it can seem to move almost by itself, spreading from one community or society of people to another who remain in their own places. The great 'world religions' of Christianity and Islam have spread throughout the world through colonial missionary and trading activity and through their endorse-ment and adoption by local populations, as indeed has Buddhism and those South Asian faiths and practices which coalesced into what we know as Hinduism. Questions of the transnational adoptions of religious practices and the relations between religion and globalisation have recently been closely examined, as in the collection edited by Csordas on 'transnational transcendence'. The issue of individual conversion, in its relations to modernity and globalisation, has formed a particular topic of anthropological attention recently. In the post-modern conjuncture of what some have called 'glocalization', both religion and mobility, besides space and place, take on novel and salient meanings.
