COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM. Religion, as well as the study of religion, can be located in colonial contexts. Colonialism is the use of military and political power to create and maintain a situation in which colonizers gain economic benefits from the raw materials and cheap labor of the colonized. More than merely a matter of military coercion and political economy, however, colonialism represents a complex intercultural encounter between alien intruders and indigenous people in what Mary Louise Pratt calls "contact zones." In analyzing colonial encounters, scholars need to consider both their material and cultural terms and conditions. In the political economy of colonialism, cultural forms of knowledge and power, discourse and practice, techniques and strategies, played an integral role in the formation of colonial situations.

European explorers, traders, conquerors, and colonial administrators operated with an ideology of territorial expansion and intercultural negation that became thoroughly...