Editorial Introduction

DISKUS 16 arises from the annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions hosted by the BASR at Liverpool Hope University, 3-6 September 2013. The conference (was also a Special Conference of the International Association for the History of Religions [IAHR]) was very well attended with 70 panels, plus three keynote lectures. Two special editions of DISKUS emerged out of the many organised panels: DISKUS 16.1 on Religion and Music, guest edited by Owen Coggins, and DISKUS 16.2 on The Problem with Numbers in the Study of Religions, guest edited by Bettina Schmidt, published earlier in the year.

This final edition, DISKUS 16.3, contains a selection of papers touching the 2013 conference theme ‘Religion, Migration, Mutation’. In the first article, Brian Bocking, Laurence Cox and Shin'ichi Yoshinaga challenge assumptions by scholars about the earliest Buddhist missions to the West and demonstrate that the Japanese-sponsored ‘Buddhist Propagation Society’ in 1889, led by Irish-born Charles Pfoundes, predates other known missions.

The second article, by Mel Prideaux with Jo Merrygold, provides an intellectual history of The Community Religions Project, founded in the mid-1970s by Michael Pye, Ursula King and William Weaver at the University of Leeds, which conducted ethnographic studies of religious diversity and pluralism in the Leeds-Bradford area, challenging religious and ethnic categories and highlighting methodological issues in order to provide a framework for studying religions in the UK.

The third article provides a contemporary study of a ‘migrant religion’ in a particular context, ‘Santo Daime in Ireland: A “Work†in Process’ by Gillian Watt, focussing on ritual activity. Especially under consideration is the conflict with law over the use of ayahuasca, ‘Daime’, and Ireland’s conflicting responses to new religious activities in a ‘post-catholic’ Republic.

The fourth article, ‘Elsewhere: seeking alternatives to European understandings of “religionâ€,’ by Graham Harvey is based on his keynote address and includes the question of how one would show aliens ‘religion’, opening up the problem of categorisation. In order to overcome the European legacy in the study of religion, Harvey proposes we start ‘elsewhere’ to bring in alternative perspectives. This and the other three articles challenge us to reflect on our approaches to the study of (what the scholar has called) ‘religion’, whether local, ‘migrant’ or elsewhere.

Suzanne Owen,

DISKUS coordinating editor,

2 December 2014