Routes et sens postcoloniaux de la transnationalisation religieuse (Relitrans)

We propose in this article to conduct a critical revision of the distinction between North and South: or, to put it another way, to compare the institutional and epistemological positions that provided a framework for our research. The project, Religious Transnationalization of the Souths: Between Ethnicizing and Universalizing (Transnacionalización religiosa de los Sures: entre la etnización y la universalización, Relitrans), which brought together 22 researchers from seven countries, aimed to test a methodology which included various innovative elements, such as the production of multi-situated ethnographies, in which students of ?the Souths? could counduct their field work operations in the ?North?, thus following a trajectory in the opposite direction to that taken by the colonization and Christianizing of African and American populations; to establish the dynamics of working together in an attempt to break with polarizations of the North and different types of South, and thematic and national specializations, preferring to emphasize transversal processes rather than specific objects; and finally, to direct attention towards the consequences of transnationalization on the decentralizing of production, and on the circulation and validation of religious practices. However, during our research we came up against difficulties deriving from the historical direction taken by colonialism, which, like the religions focused on, still produces effects on the ?opposite directions? of transnationalization, and these difficulities now lead us to ask the following questions: to what extent does the distinction between the North and various Souths still permeate the conceptual categories and epistemological positions of our researchers? Is academic discourse capable of overcoming or recomposing these interpretations? And how are we to find a common language, a ?multicentrism? in the production of knowledge, according to the example set by the actors we have observed?