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Religion 161

recruiting on college campuses, so that I seemed to be warning parents to
protect their children from dangerous cults. In the few minutes allotted to
Heaven’s Gate, the program portrayed its leaders as evil and manipulative and
their followers mentally unstable, guaranteeing their incomprehensibility.
The deep need to categorize some religions as normal and others as
deviant has distorted both academic study and popular understandings of
religion. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian accuses the field of anthropology
of “intellectual imperialism” because its “claim to power” originated in
the uses of time to construct its own object, “the savage, the primitive, the
Other” (Fabian 1983: 1). What is true for anthropology may be even more
to the point for religious studies. Talal Asad and others have argued that the
concept of religion is inextricably bound to its colonial past (Asad 1993). Or,
as Robert A. Orsi puts it,

the discipline was constructed by means of exclusion—in fact and in
theory—of these other ways of living between heaven and earth, which
were relegated to the world of sects, cults, fundamentalisms, popular
piety, ritualism, magic, primitive religion, millennialism, anything but
‘religion’.
(Orsi 2005: 188)

In the history of the study of religion, excluded practices have been identified
with the “primitive” past and natural world, seen as overly focused on the
body and located in “other” or profane spaces. It is these excluded “other
ways of living between heaven and earth” that I want to move front and
center (Beal 2005).
By starting at the edges rather than at the center and by paying attention
to the margins where alternative religious cultures take shape, one brings
important issues sharply into view. From these often-excluded vantage
points, we might more readily see how alternative and marginalized religious
communities contest or invert dominant ritual patterns, lifestyles, practices
of the self, political involvement, and communal structures. What happens
when we invert the opposition between religion and its other and look for
the source of religious creativity in otherness, including the body, teenage
television fan online discussions, alternative music subcultures, new religious
movements, festivals, and other unlikely sites? These places are akin to what
Michel Foucault calls “heterotopias” that function as “counter sites, a kind of
effectively enacted utopia in which…all the other real sites that can be found
within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”
(Foucault 1986: 23). Heterotopias are interesting in their own right and for
what they reveal about more traditional religious sites that they implicitly
or explicitly call into question. There are, of course, many possible “other”