ARTICLES On Moving Across: Translocative Religion and the Interpreter’s Position Thomas A. Tweed Thomas A. Tweed is the Zachary Smith Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the Uni- versity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. I presented an earlier version of this article as the Robert C. Lester Lecture on the Study of Religion at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on 21 March 2000. Although I have revised it, in some ways I have preserved its original form and context. I am grateful to those at Boulder who offered com- ments, especially Michelene Pesantubbee and Lynn Ross-Bryant, as well as other scholars around the country who read earlier drafts, including David Bromley, Julie Byrne, Bruce B. Lawrence, Katie Lofton, Russell T. McCutcheon, Robert A. Orsi, Ann Taves, Mark C. Taylor, and an anonymous reviewer for JAAR. Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2002, Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 253–277. © 2002 The American Academy of Religion Scholars in many fields have considered the position of the interpreter, and religious studies scholars have addressed some of the relevant issues. However, none of the available accounts is fully satisfying because they either fail to locate the interpreter or imagine the interpreter’s position as fixed. In this article I draw on my experience of doing fieldwork with transnational migrants as I try to move toward a more textured account of where we stand when we do our work. I explore the ambiguities of that position and suggest that scholars, like transnational migrants, are con- stantly moving across. Scholars continually move back and forth between inside and outside, fact and value, evidence and narrative, the living and the dead, here and there, us and them.