50 Peter Beyer
context of the slave trade. Especially in the later twentieth century, the descendants of
these involuntary colonists have become the prime carriers of a number of increasingly
distinct religions such as Vodoun, Candombl ́e/Santer ́ıa/Yoruba, Umbanda, and Rasta-
farianism, all to a large extent based on a reconstruction and reinvention of African
traditions. During this same period, the prevailing approach of aboriginal peoples in the
Americas has been, as noted above, to refuse reconstruction of their religious traditions
as religions, insisting instead that these are undifferentiable dimensions of aboriginal
culture.
In other parts of the world, with the limited exception of parts of Southern Africa,
European colonization was not an option. It is these areas that have been witness to the
(re)construction of all the other so-called world religions, almost invariably as key as-
pects of the responses to European power. Whether we are dealing with the invention
of State Shinto in post-Meiji Restoration Japan, the crystallization and solidification
of Hindu and Sikh religion in South Asia, the increased orthodoxification of Islam
from Northern Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, the reimagination of a unified
Buddhism in East Asia, or its nationalization in Sri Lanka, the movements toward the
clearer identification of these various traditions as religions have been an important
dimension in the attempts of people in these regions to respond to European power by
appropriating and adapting the latter’s dominant instrumentalities, including that of
“religion.” Moreover, in most cases, this appropriation of distinct religious identity has
occurred in tandem with the assertion of national identities as the basis of founding
modern sovereign states. Even where indigenous elites expressly refused to imagine
local traditions as a religion, such as in China with “Confucianism,” this happened as
part of strategies for constructing a strong nation and state that would allow China to
become great again. That possibility, in turn, points to some rather important ambi-
guities in this entire historical development, ambiguities that concern the boundaries
of religions, their relations to each other, but also critically the status of thus recon-
structed religions with respect to the other, “secularized” domains or systems. It is to a
discussion of these ambiguities that we now turn.
RELIGIONS, CONTESTED BOUNDARIES, AND MATTERS RELIGIOUS
OUTSIDE RELIGIONS
Although the last few centuries have indeed witnessed the sort of revisioning of religions
just outlined, this has not occurred without contestation, and even open opposition.
Aside from direct clashes between religions, such disputes have followed the lines dis-
cussed at the beginning of this chapter: Struggles over the distinction between religions,
contention about the relations between religion(s) and other domains of social life, and
disagreement about the value of that which is meant by religion. Often enough, more
than one of these have been at issue. Since here cannot be the place for a thorough
discussion of the complex ways in which these conflicts have manifested themselves,
a brief overview will suffice to give an idea.
Struggles over the distinction between religions are perhaps best exemplified in
the case of Hinduism versus Sikhism. Sikh traditions had their origin in the sixteenth
century, when Muslims ruled the subcontinent. In that context they from early on
focused on the difference between Sikhs and Muslims. Only in the later nineteenth
century, under British rule, did Sikhs begin to insist with increasing consistency that