Notes “Weasternization” of the West: Kumbh Mela as a

Notes
constantly shifting, with different groups competing for
claims as to what is “Eastern” and what is “Western.”
1. I have marked the categories of “East” and “West” in
quotation marks to purposefully demarcate these categories as highly contested and discursive markers that encapsulate not only geographical spaces, but also the cultural
groups that are uncritically associated (or not associated)
with these spaces. Ultimately, I view these categories as
2. While the University of Manitoba does offer Introduction to World Religions, this course offering is not required
in order to take more thematic courses. As such, students
can take thematic religion courses without having to take
Introduction to World Religions.
“Weasternization” of the West:
Kumbh Mela as a Pilgrimage Place For Spiritual Seekers from the West
Marianne C. Qvortrup Fibiger, Associate Professor, Study of Religion, Aarhus University
MF@cas.au.dk
doi: 10.1558/bsor.v44i2.26351
Along with the processes of globalization, the religious landscape of the world is rapidly changing.
This is not a new observation. Neither is the influx of
religious ideas from the East to the West.1 However,
what seems to be changing is how spiritual seekers or
spiritual pilgrims from the West are becoming more
engaged with India as a sacred space or landscape,
or as a center. India—or the East—is no longer only
a place where one acquires ideas but it has also become a place that a person either physically or mentally visits2 as a part of a self-constructed religious or
spiritual project or pilgrimage. It has become a place
that people look to in their search(es) for authenticity,
inner peace, inner balance, mental or physical healing, in order to become one with the some universal
energy—or, for a few—to reach salvation.
It could, of course be argued that this was also the
quest of the hippies who descended on India in the
late 1960s and 1970s. But what is different today are
the travel patterns and the kinds of people who are
attracted to this kind of pilgrimage. Today, travel is
much more organized and the time spent in India is
often shorter and more focused, with the spiritual
seekers having special auspicious places as goals, such
as the Kumbh Melā, the most important pilgrimage
event within the Hindu tradition only happening every twelfth year. The number of people traveling has
also grown, as has the diversity of the visitors who
now come from a broad spectrum of age and social
groups, religious and geographical affiliations. It is
still not a mass movement, but we are getting a little
closer. This fits well with Heelas and Woodhead’s notion, articulated in the very title of their book on the
VOLUME 44, NUMBER 2 / JUNE 2015
topic, A Spiritual Revolution in the West (2005), where
religion is giving way to spirituality and where Eastern notions and Eastern world- or life-view, which
focuses on the individual not the institution, offer a
form of salvation that suits people living in late-modern, individualistic societies.
For Zygmunt Bauman (2000), one of the main characteristics of contemporary modern societies is that
everything flows like liquid, what he calls “liquid
modernity.” The reason for using fluids as a metaphor for late-modern societies is that fluids are neither fixed in space nor bounded in time, but rather
they defy any fixed shape and instead are constantly
changing. And last but not least: fluids travel easily
(Bauman 2000, 2). The same can be argued in relation
to religion and religious ideas in late-modern societies and, therefore, such religious ideas fit with what
can be called “fluid religion” or “fluid religiosity.”3
This emphasizes not only how religious notions and
concepts flow between people, groups and societies,
but also how new meanings can be added or given
to them through such socially interactive moments of
“fluidity.” This doesn’t mean that everything is floating or becomes floating signifiers without any anchor
or filter through which it is interpreted, but it shows
that the cultural system or systems are in an on-going
change or flow.
This concept can go hand in hand with that of cultural hybridization, which has been employed by
many post- or late-modern theorists (Homi Bhabha,
Stuart Hall) as a way of transcending the essentializing tendencies in identity discourse, suggesting that
identity and culture are generated by a cross-cultural
BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 15
or multi-dimensional communication or better mutual impact. This constructed meeting point, which
Bhabha (1994) calls a “third space,” both contains
elements of and differs from the “original” cultures.
This meeting point is never fixed but comprises heterogeneous elements with shifting points of views.
In this way, cultural hybridity is continuously constructed in new ways and is a product of an on-going
process of negotiations and identifications formed in
relation to context.
This corresponds to what Walter Benjamin labels
a “dialectical image,” where both mirroring and mimesis are at stake (Urban 2003, 3) emphasizing on the
one hand how this imaging is shaped by something
that can reflect the mirroring as upbringing, circumstances, and context, and on the other hand how attempts are made to imitate new things that somehow
are appealing. This can also be termed “creolization,”
a term from linguistics describing the convergence of
two languages creating a third, often taking most of
its grammar from the one language and most of its
vocabulary from the other (Burke 2008, 123).
This article, with reference to fieldwork carried out
at one of the many pilgrim camps (the Nandeshwar
Sewa Trust camp in Allahabad municipality, during the Kumbh Melā 2013), will discuss the impact
that the East is having on the West. Colin Campbell
has termed this process “The Easternization of the
West,” and he understands this on the one hand as
“a fundamental revolution in Western civilization,
one that can be compared in significance to the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment”
(2007, 41). In that sense he calls the process a process
of de-Westernization. On the other hand, he emphasizes, that just as Western ideas and practices have
changed when introduced in the East and amended
Eastern concepts and practices, the same is happening when Eastern ideas are introduced in the West
(2007, 39). Especially the last point is important in
the perspective of this article, which is the reason for
suggesting a new notion: the “Weasternization” of
the West, acknowledging how Eastern world- or life
views and practices not only are interpreted through
a Western lens so they fit Western life-styles, but are
also given new meaning. I do not mean to revive an
Orientalist viewpoint, but to stress that all human beings, through a process of socialization, are provided
with a special optic through which they interpret the
world—even if the interpretation is in opposition to
the world- and life view they are raised in. As Bren16 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION
ton writes, “Cultural entrepreneurs, however, need
symbolic resources for such an undertaking” (Breton, 2012, 117).
The process of encompassing Eastern notions into
a Western context (and I could add vice versa if my
focus, for instance, was on contemporary India taking Western ideas of secularization into account) is,
in other words, not a one-to-one process. This is also
an observation made by Mark Singleton, who in his
thorough investigation of modern yoga, both in India and the West, comes to the conclusion that at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, after Vivekananda had introduced yoga to a wider audience in
the West, yoga was combined with Western gymnastics, thereby imparting a new and more physically
oriented meaning to yoga practices (Singleton 2010).
This process of reinterpretation or translation is also
the case when it comes to the understanding of and
participation in the Kumbh Melā, especially in relation to understanding the snaan or holy dip in the
water on the most auspicious days at Kumbh Melā.
This article will give examples of how this is interpreted or translated in such a way that it suits the
Western oriented spiritual seeker or pilgrim in his or
her spiritual auto biographical patchwork, constructed by the Western oriented mind.
My fieldwork was with a small research team of
six people.4 We conducted more than thirty semistructured interviews with travelers staying in the
Nandeshwar Sewa Trust camp as part of the Kumbh
Melā 2013. The main two foci in our interview guide
were 1) the motivation for attending the Kumbh
Melā including purpose or expectations; and 2) has
the Kumbh Melā lived up to expectations, and if the
interviewee took a snaan, why did they choose to do
so? Did they feel anything in particular while bathing? The main aim of the questionnaire was to gain
a deeper understanding of why Kumbh Melā in Allahabad, 2013, seems to have attracted a larger number of non-Hindu Westerners than previous Kumbh
Melās.5
With this case study I hope to contribute to the understanding of how the religious landscape is moving, in particular in relation to what this article calls
the “Weasternization” of the West. At the same time
this article will emphasize how place seems to matter. And not only as an icon for a specific tradition—
in this example Kumbh Melā as a pilgrimage spot or
tīrtha for Hindus—but as an index for spirituality for
spiritual seekers no matter what religious affiliation.
VOLUME 44, NUMBER 2 /JUNE 2015
The Setting
The Nandeshwar Sewa Trust camp was situated on
the opposite side of the river to the main pilgrimage
spot, at Trivenī Sangam,6 where most of the rituals,
processions, and bathing ceremonies were conducted and where the different sādhu- groups, the guru
tents, and most of the more local Indian Hindus were
staying. The camp had an Internet site in English
with pictures of the different tents and a professional
international-oriented bureau that could take care of
all the logistics of people’s travel and stay. The facilities in the camp were pretty good compared to many
other camps. The food was vegetarian and mostly Indian, but also Western-oriented. Every morning and
evening guests could attend yoga classes and āratī. In
other words, the setting was prepared both to suit the
well-off Indian and the Western traveler who wants a
bit of comfort but also a bit of the “authentic” India.
The research group who conducted the study estimated that around a third of the guests in the camp
were without Indian heritage.7 These guests are the
focus of this paper.
Tourist, Pilgrim, Religious Tourist,
Spiritual Seeker, or a Bit of All?
Since the beginning of the 1990s the boundaries between a tourist and a pilgrim have been widely discussed in anthropology, sociology, and the academic
study of religion (see, for example, Raj and Morpeth
2007; Ahlin 2005; Badone and Roseman 2004). Furthermore, Eric Cohen’s (1992, 50-55) structural distinction between a pilgrim and a tourist, as a person
who is either traveling toward “sacred” centers (pilgrim) or toward the “other” (tourist) is now questioned. Or as argued by Badone and Roseman, the
tourist is not moving from a center to the “other,” but
is creating a new center in the formerly peripheral location (2004, 11). In other words, the modern tourist
or traveler does not travel from center to periphery
and back to the center again, but travels between centers. This process is made possible through, among
other things, the Internet and travel guides, by which
the traveler becomes acquainted or familiar with the
place to which he or she is traveling. This does not
mean that the centers have the same meaning for the
traveler, but they are chosen especially because they
seem to suit as a center in a particular self-biographiVOLUME 44, NUMBER 2 / JUNE 2015
cal story. This effect also seems to be the case for many
visiting Kumbh Melā, or as one of our informants—
a 62-year-old woman who can be categorized as a
Christian-oriented spiritual seeker—put it, the whole
world can now be understood as a center, or it is as if
the religious center can move together with the one
who is carrying the religion along:
I told my family and children before traveling to
Kumbh Melā: If I die in India it is okay. I die one
day anyway. If I don’t see you again, we will always be connected. . . . I don’t relate Kumbh Melā
to Hinduism, but I relate it somehow to Jesus. I
think everybody relates it to something. But this
event really integrates religions . . . yes, yes.
In other words, the distinction between a pilgrim
and a tourist becomes blurred. This blurring of distinctions is also the case for all other categories when
trying to differentiate between various groups of travelers. It also serves as a starting point and as an analytical framework for our research on Western travelers to the Kumbh Melā. I suggest adding at least three
more categories to the former distinction between a
tourist and a pilgrim: (1) a religious or cultural tourist, (2) a spiritual seeker, and (3) “a bit of all.” With
the last category I emphasize the difficulties in making static analytical distinctions at all and that the
motivation and the participation in the Kumbh Melā
can change a person’s understanding of the travel in
his or her self-biography but also while being there.
To look at these categories in a little more detail the
following descriptions have been developed for our
research project:
(a) A pilgrim. Here we can make one more distinction between the traditional pilgrim and the spiritual pilgrim. A pilgrim has a particular soteriological
reason for traveling. But while a traditional pilgrim
travels to special auspicious places within one tradition such as the Hindu tradition, the spiritual pilgrim
does not. He or she travels to all pilgrimage places
in the world, where he or she believes the universal
energy or something similar is present, and where
the stay is understood as a step toward or maybe the
place for finding salvation. Salvation can be understood both as inner peace or as salvation for the life
to come. Spiritual pilgrims understand themselves as
being their own authorities; they want to construct
their own path to salvation and they don’t want to
be subject to institutionally embedded explanatory
BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 17
models. They are most often resistant to specific dogmas and have an eclectic personal theology or soteriology. A traditional pilgrim to the Kumbh Melā
will be embedded in the Hindu tradition around the
Kumbh Melā. He or she will refer to the mythological explanation behind the Kumbh Melā and will try
to follow orthopraxis while staying there in the hope
of being purified for bad karma and attaining moksha
after snaan. In contrast, the spiritual pilgrim will do
as he or she believes to be appropriate. Such pilgrims
are attracted by the mythological story, which gives
the place authenticity, but they mostly interpret the
mythological story which is a particular cosmological fight between gods and demons within the Hindu tradition or as an allegory on the on-going fight
between the evil and the good, which can be related
both to a global fight and to their own inner mental
fight. The whole setting also attracts them with the
presence of gurus and sādhus. Many will be dressed
in Indian clothes and wear the Indian holy colors
(such as orange or white) as well as tulsī necklaces
etc. Through such actions, they make themselves feel
part of the energy of the place. Rana Singh and Masaaki Fukunaga (2000) call this “pilgrimage-tourism”
and they understand this as a sacred journey and as
a modern substitute for a religious yātrā (2000, 183).
I prefer using the designation “spiritual pilgrim,”
because this designation emphasizes that the tourist
does not just follow in the footsteps of the Hindu tradition, but interprets that tradition in a new way so
that it either fits to his or her self-constructed system
of meaning or is understood as a supplement to an
overall system of meaning embedded somehow in
one of the world religions. In that way the journey
can be understood as a sacred journey, but I disagree
with calling it a substitute for a religious yātrā.
(b) A spiritual seeker has much in common with
the spiritual pilgrim, but differs from him or her by
not being primarily oriented toward a soteriological
goal. Instead he or she wants to qualify this life; or,
as Merith McGuire emphasizes in relation to spirituality, “It is a sense of an individual condition-inprocess or, in contrast to ‘religiosity,’ it is more oriented toward ‘religion as lived’“(2008, 228). Religion
as lived can both refer to religion as being an external
guidance of daily day practice, and it can also refer
to when religion is understood as something individual, private, and internal, as a voice from within,
who tells the person what to do. The individual self
is the focus, and the person can metaphorically be
18 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION
understood as a temple or a self-reliant system that
only integrates the elements from the surroundings
that suit the system. Therefore, the spiritual seeker is
always open to new ideas if they can contribute to or
fit his or her self-reliant or autopoetic system. This is
understood in a Niklas Luhmann perspective, where
the individual as a system selectively takes in the elements that somehow fit the system. This is called
“structural coupling,” which refers to the relation between system and its environment (Luhmann 2003).
Paul Heelas’ notion of “wellbeing spirituality” (2008)
is also suitable here.
(c) A religious or cultural tourist can be a Western
tourist traveling for the purpose of gaining a better
understanding of Eastern religion and culture, or,
alternatively, they may be motivated by more secular cultural interests. Also individuals from the East
living in diaspora communities in the West, may fall
into this category if they travel in order to (re)connect
with their religious and cultural heritage. In relation
to Kumbh Melā and our fieldwork in Nandeshwar
Sewa Trust camp, all groups were represented. One
insightful phenomenon noted was the growing
number of Hindu Indians living in urban areas who
labeled themselves as “secularized Hindus.”This
group is important to take into account both when
categorizing travelers or tourists in India and when
discussing the changes happening in India. As expressed by one of our key informants, a middle-aged
architect from Mysore:
My main motive for traveling to Kumbh Melā –
which I understand as a kind of ‘Religious Woodstock’, where Hindus, Gurus, and sādhus from all
parts of India meets—was to become acquainted to parts of my culture, which I feel entirely
delinked from. You know all the rituals, village
people, sādhus doing peculiar things and so on.
But I must confess; this experience has somehow
affected me.
(c) A tourist is one who chooses religious or cultural heritage places or festivals as part of their travel
package. They mostly travel to Kumbh Melā in order to experience this spectacular or event because it
happens so seldom. It is exotic. It is special. In some
cases it is not really understandable. It is distinct, and
thus it is good for the photo album. In this group,
we include all kinds of professional and semi-professional photographers. This group has been critically
discussed among the Kumbh Melā organizers, beVOLUME 44, NUMBER 2 /JUNE 2015
cause they disturb all the other groups when hunting
down the best pictures. This is what John Urry calls
the “tourist gaze” (1992).
(d) A bit of all. This last category, of course, is the
most difficult category to work with and to place
people in. The reason for having this category is not
only to find a place for “leftover travelers,” but also
to emphasize that it can be difficult to place them
in just one of the above mentioned categories. This
category also provides for those tourists who move
between the categories during their stay. As an example, we met religious and cultural tourists who did
not intend to participate in snaan, but they became
so moved by the surrounding sentiment that they
did decide to participate and found some religious or
spiritual meaning in the act. As one younger German
woman noted, “Even though most of the Indians understand me as a tourist because I walk around with
a camera and all that, and even though I might have
understood myself as a tourist in the beginning, I
now feel in my heart that I am a pilgrim.” We met
similar views among quite a few travelers who admitted how their stay and especially the atmosphere
in and around Kumbh Melā had had an emotional
and spiritual impact on them.
The Western Spiritual Pilgrim or Seeker
In relation to the theme of this article, let’s turn our
focus to those western spiritual tourists who all had a
spiritual motivation for coming to Kumbh Melā and
who nearly all have taken or intended to take a snaan.
In the following, I will give examples of the kinds of
spiritual meaning they attributed to the act, and use
these examples to discuss the “Weasternization” process of the West. In this context snaan is not directly
viewed as a way of attaining moksha, as described in
Hindu mythology or Hindu soteriology, but instead
it is interpreted through a Western lens so that it fits
with the Western pilgrim’s cultural upbringing. Of
particular note is the high number of these kinds of
spiritual seekers who were part of the hippie movement or followed in its wake, while many others had
parents who participated either directly or indirectly
in the hippie movement or at least were inspired by
the new life- and world ideals that followed.
In relation to snaan, most of our informants understood this as a stream of universal energy that they either became part of or that was somehow transferred
to them. Most of them expressed how they either felt
VOLUME 44, NUMBER 2 / JUNE 2015
released from something or became full of a special
stream of energy. Some came with the intention of being purified, to find absolution for bad relationships,
and nearly all of them saw their travel to Kumbh
Melā as a new beginning for a better and more fruitful life. This was well articulated by one of our informants, an older American man who falls into the
category of spiritual pilgrim. For the purposes of this
discussion the interview will be split into three parts:
a) his understanding of being at the Kumbh Melā, b)
his understanding of and expectations for the snaan,
and c) his understanding of moksha in relation to taking a snaan. His elaboration of these three important
aspects of being at the Kumbh Melā gives what the
author considers a good example of the “Weasternization” process. The interviewee’s comments are
quoted below:
a) His understanding of Kumbh Melā: “It is hard to
find words for it (just being at the Kumbh Melā ), it is
more a stream of energy, more as being encompassed
in a great womb of energy; and it doesn’t really matter what you do while you are here…but you walk
around and absorb that energy. . . . And when you go
back whereever you came from, this energy will start
working . . . You can only describe what is happening on the physical level; you can never express the
spiritual experience.”
b) His understanding and expectation of taking a snaan:
“I haven’t taken a snaan yet, but I can tell you what
I felt, when I took a snaan in Haridwar, at the latest
smaller Kumbh Melā. I felt like lifted, so elevated,
and it lasted for many days. So I expect the similar,
when taking a snaan here.”
c) His understanding of moksha in relation to taking a
snaan: “Moksha I understand in relative terms. . . . In
relative terms there is something very sacred about
taking a snaan also in relation to moksha. . . .We can
talk about sacred vibrations and the symbolic bathing
away the sins you have in Christianity and in many
other religions. You know when your heart is into it,
and if you are spiritual, you will get the benefits.”
This interview gives many examples of how the
Kumbh Melā is translated so it both fits the interviewee’s own system of meaning and also, in more general terms, a system of meaning he shares with many
spiritual pilgrims or seekers from the West. First of
all—and as underlined before—the idea of the presence of some form of energy or stream of energy, that
flows from a kind of universal source to the individual who participates with all his or her heart (meaning
BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 19
that you have to believe in it) is a consistent feature
throughout our interviews; this also seems to be the
case in relation to taking a snaan. Only a few are reflecting on moksha, but most of the spiritual pilgrims
and seekers from the West are not participating or
hoping to find a whole new system of meaning (they
don’t intend to convert to Hinduism or another religion), instead they want to find a supplement to their
self-constructed system of meaning or they are looking for confirmation.
Conclusion
By introducing the term “Weasternization” and by
focusing on the Western visitors at the 2013 Kumbh
Melā in Allahabad, who can be categorized as either
spiritual pilgrims or spiritual seekers, I have tried
both to identify why Kumbh Melā seems to attract a
still increasing number of people from the West and
to give examples of the kinds of meaning they attach to their stay. With this minor case study I hope
to contribute to the understanding of how the religious landscape is moving in a global world—and
not only in relation to how Eastern notions and concepts attract people from the West, albeit in culturally translated or interpreted forms to make them suit
the Western lifestyle and ideals. At the same time I
have tried to show how Allahabad under Kumbh
Melā has become a tīrtha (a pilgrimage spot), not
only for Hindus but also for people from the West,
who in their pursuit of finding authenticity want to
visit the place either physically or virtually, exactly
because it is loaded with meaning. They do not have
the intention to convert to Hinduism, but they either want to come closer to their own religiosity or
spirituality or just to figure out if they have any at
all. Place seems to matter—as a symbolic, imaginary,
and empirical reality. This can be seen both as part
of religious tourism mostly from the West to the East
and vice versa or even seen as an on-going looping
movement between East and West.
In other words, Kumbh Melā, the most important pilgrimage event within the Hindu religion, is
loaded with meaning, both with old or traditional
meaning, which is exactly why it can be given new
meanings as well. Since the place is inscribed in the
Hindu tradition through myths and rituals, it is surrounded by an aura of authenticity and authority,
which seems precisely to be the reason for the Western spiritual seeker to visit the place.
With this example I thus hope not only to show
20 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION
how religious notions and concepts are flowing
among people, groups, and societies, but also how
they can be given new meaning or be inserted into
or supplement a specific system of meaning that the
individual either reflectively or unreflectively has
become a part of through their upbringing. I will,
therefore, state that the world is always being read
through a specific culturally implemented filter. It
doesn’t mean that these cultures or systems of meanings are not changing, but they will somehow be the
frameworks of reading the world. That is why I have
introduced the term “Weasternization” of the West,
emphasizing that even though the West or the Western world in the sense of systems is becoming more
and more influenced by notions, concepts, and ideas
from the East, and despite Western people finding
the most sacred spots or gurus for their religiosity or
spirituality in the East, these will always be understood or interpreted on the premises of the Western
meaning systems themselves. Systems are changing
and therefore never fixed, but in spite of this they do
follow a mutually shared communicative code that
is translating new forms into the meaning systems
themselves in order to make them digestible. The
changes somehow have to come from within. This
also applies very much to easternly based meaning
systems and their relations to each other and to the
West.
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Notes
1. I emphasize that labeling an East and a West is a construction and not a call for essentializing. First of all, it is
difficult to place an East as well as a West geographically, historically, and sociologically; secondly an East and a
West are in themselves complex entities with great internal
differences both nationally and locally but also between
groups and individuals. I have chosen to use the notions
as an overall framework and as point of departure for discussing flows of notions and concepts in the contemporary
world.
2. You can also travel in cyberspace. A web site supported
by the government of Uttar Pradesh invites visitors to fill
out a survey form asking for details of their caste, gender,
and physical attributes and to attach their picture. They
then choose a date and time when this person can log into
the website and see their picture superimposed as a head
on a virtual body being dipped into the Ganges. In this
way the viewer can experience a virtual purifying process
at home.
3. Bauman himself does not leave room for religion in liquid modernity except of fundamentalism.
4. My research group consisted of six post-graduate students from Aarhus University, who did a tremendous job
interviewing. Special thanks to Jacob Hartvig Sandager
who has done an indispensable job transcribing all our interviews.
5. See for example MacLean (2009) who did a thorough
study of the Kumbh Melā in 2001. MacLean’s focus was not
the Western travelers, but she does mention them in her
article as tourists who mostly want to experience this exotic
other, without participating (321–22), and Eck (2012) who
describes how the Kumbh Meā has attracted ever greater
numbers of people over the years but the emphasis is on
Hindus (153–54).
6. Literally: ”The intertwining braid of three,” where the
Ganges, Yamuna, and the mythological river Sarasvati converge. Bathing in the confluence of these three rivers during Kumbh Mela is thought to purify the person who is
bathing and free them from bad karma so that they may
attain moksha.
7. In this article “people of Indian heritage” is understood
to cover all Indians having an Indian address or passport,
as well as those living abroad with Indian relatives or roots.
We can differentiate between at least three groups in the
camp: the Indians, the Indian Diaspora, and the Western
travelers.
BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 21