Introduction. Unsettling encounters: Sites, knowledge exchange, and the making of religion in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT This article introduces a special issue on practices of religious and scholarly knowledge exchange in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. In both regions, the makings of religion have been informed by unsettling encounters between religious experts on the one hand and academic scholars of, and in, religion on the other. These encounters, we argue, can be revealed and productively analyzed through a focus on sites of learning and exchange, such as schools and universities, temples and monasteries, holy shrines, conferences and workshops, but also texts and archives. At such sites, alternative actors, referred to in this special issue as ‘strategic amateurs and accidental experts’, often emerge as unexpected agents of religious change. After explaining the central theme and approach, we draw together and synthesize two strands of argument found in the separate articles, respectively the centrality of moral geographies and geographic imaginations to the making of religion and the intriguing role played by performances of expertise, either as a form of gatekeeping in religious communities and institutions or as alternative sources of religious knowledge and authority. The article concludes with a reflective note on the role of scholars in both fortifying and destabilizing understandings of region and religion.