Looking beyond religious studies, not in a temporal but in a spatial sense, this brief essay identifies openings for multidisciplinary research and reflection in the study of material religion. The discussion focuses on categories, formations, and circulations—the historical contingency of basic categories of religion, the colonial and imperial forces in formations of religion, and the mobility of materiality in circulations of religion. By attending to these dynamics and highlighting recent publications in the field, this essay indicates some of the ways in which the ‘beyond’ is already present in the study of religion.
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David Chidester (2017) studied this question.