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Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad's Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment (Routledge, 2022) …
Guest: Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad
Date: 1/11/2024
Tulasi Srinivas' edited volume Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023) brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning …
Guest: Tulasi Srinivas, Hanna Kim and Quinn Clark
Christopher Jain Miller's book Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge, 2023) is a refreshingly original, multi-sited ethnography of transnational yoga that obliges us to look beyond …
Guest: Christopher Jain Miller
Date: 11/2/2023
Middle-Class Dharma: Gender, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2023) is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging …
Guest: Jennifer D. Ortegren
Date: 9/21/2023
On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand …
Guest: Kerry P. C. San Chirico
Date: 9/7/2023
Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and …
Guest: Emilia Bachrach
Date: 8/30/2023
In World of Worldly Gods: The Persistence and Transformation of Shamanic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan (Oxford UP, 2023), Kelzang T. Tashi offers the first comprehensive examination of the tenacity of Shamanic Bon practices, as they are lived …
Guest: Kelzang T. Tashi
Date: 8/24/2023
Michael Baltutis' book The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance (SUNY Press, 2023) details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the …
Guest: Michael Baltutis
Date: 8/3/2023
Brenda Beck discusses her lifelong work on a Tamil folk legend, resulting in a graphic novel, an English translation and Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures (U Toronto Press, 2022) which identifies …
Guest: Brenda Beck
Date: 7/27/2023
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford …
Guest: Heike Oberlin and David Shulman
Date: 4/27/2023