[Spain] (2000), Vienna, Austria (2002), São Paulo, Brazil (2002 and 2006),
Lima, Perú (2002), Roehampton, England (2002), Paris, France (2002), Taxco,
Mexico (2002), Chester, England (2003), Erfurt, Germany (2003), Turku,
Finland (2003 and 2005), Chiapas, Mexico (2004), Havana, Cuba (2004),
Tübingen, Germany (2004), Oxford, England (2004), Bayreuth, Germany
(2005), Mallorca, Spain (2005), Santiniketan, India (2006), and Toledo, Spain
(2006).
Such global opportunities for religious studies arise, of course, as a result
of innovations in the technologies of communication and transportation
that have produced what theorists of globalization, following David Harvey
(1990), are fond of calling time–space compression. Unlike two hundred years
ago, when international communication largely depended upon the physical
transmission of letters or persons by very slow means, scholars today have
virtually immediate access to their counterparts almost everywhere in the
world via telephone, email, and videoconferencing. Electronic media have
accelerated the speed and volume of the transmission of scholarly work and
as a result its availability. In addition, since the introduction of the Boeing 707
in 1958 rapid and relatively inexpensive commercial jet air travel has not
only increased the accessibility of fieldwork sites but has also made it poss-
ible for scholars from around the world to meet relatively frequently, consult,
and collaborate with one another face to face. To be sure, not everyone
has equal access to the benefits of these technologies. The structures of the
global scholarly community in religious studies, like the structures of other
global communities, reflect differences in power and access to economic
resources.
This volume does not provide a global vision of religious studies. It only
takes a first step. It provides a global view. In successive chapters it maps, in
a preliminary fashion, work that is being done around the world.^5 It does so
first of all in order to make scholars more aware of what their counterparts
elsewhere have been and are doing. What, one wonders, do scholars in the
Americas know about current debates in religious studies in the People’s
Republic of China? How familiar are African scholars with the work of their
South Asian counterparts? More broadly, the volume aims to make serious
readers aware that, despite the impression left by many otherwise excellent
introductory texts (e.g. Michaels [ed.] 2004; Nye 2003; Pals 2006; Strenski
2006), thinking about religions is not confined to their own or someone else’s
corner of the globe. One may hope that increased awareness will result in
increasingly greater collaboration between scholars in different regions. One
may perhaps dream that the volume will help change the way we think about
the study of religions, its history, structures, institutions, leading figures, and
key issues.
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6
7
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9
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INTRODUCTION
3
