Efforts to achieve "global" fidelity in the ethnography of religious ideas are efforts at explication that include discussion of the environments and likely polysemy of important religious terms, the determination and exploration of relevant and revealing tropes, and systematic efforts to make explicit what is significantly implicit, both with respect to the intuitive structures and understandings that support the plausibility of religious ideas and the counter-intuitive features of those ideas that render them memorable. Yet more, I think, is required. Serious efforts should also be made to learn who professes or endorses the reported ideas, for not everyone in a given population may do so. Attempts, moreover, should be made to assess the relative strength of professions of belief, which may well vary from hedged or weak affirmations to those that seem vigorous and confident. These efforts will collectively support and make more convincing the anthropologist's theorizing about the functions of religious ideas in discrete populations and in human history.

Efforts at global fidelity are not solely focused on the human population under study. They are also inevitably motivated, weighted, and constrained by considerations relating to the eventual target audience of the ethnographic monograph.

The ethnographer has the difficult task of conveying, as accurately and as cogently as possible, what he or she has come to understand about religious ideas studied in the field to an audience (often largely of other anthropologists though sometimes a wider audience) that lacks comparable knowledge and experience of the field situation. Explication of categories and ideas encountered in the field, moreover, is attempted in the language of the eventual target audience, the readership of the ethnographic monograph. In addition to using that audience's "ordinary language," explication is also likely to involve the so-called professional analytical categories of anthropologists. And these, in the overwhelming majority of cases, are specially refined and often contested versions of Western folk categories (see Saler 2000 [1993] for "religion"). In short, conveyance depends on the artful and problem-plagued application and adjustment of categories from different sources, sources that themselves answer to different interests. Such conveyance, in any case, constitutes "translation" in that term's fundamental etymological senses: "transfer" and "transformation". It amounts to a task of mediation or bridge-building between disparate but not entirely incompatible clusters of understandings. It is, indeed, something of a secular analog to what some religious communities expect of their priests.

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