Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

Religion and Pride relates debates on religion, globalization, diaspora, and secularism to an ethnography of Hindus in the French overseas department La Réunion. Taking up the locally important notion of fierté – pride in the sense of justified self-esteem, the author demonstrates how aspirational pride can work as a driving force behind religious revitalization, diasporic identification, and the making of religious minorities. Rather than a mere inner feeling, pride is an emotion expressed in public, a discourse, and a strategy. Through the examination of religious practices and self-making projects, the author shows how Reunionese Hindus assert pride in their religion as a means of gaining social status and recognition. Religion and Pride traces how Reunionese Hindus’ pride and recognition relate to French laicism, notions of India, ritual experiences, and diverse forms of appropriating, performing, and negotiating religious knowledge.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Natalie Lang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her doctoral thesis received the Frobenius Research Award. After her doctoral studies at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Natalie was a Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. She holds an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Heidelberg.

Patrick Eisenlohr is Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Society and Culture in Modern India at the University of Göttingen. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and previously held positions at Utrecht University, Washington University in St. Louis, and New York University. He is the author of Little India: Diaspora, Time and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. (University of California Press, 2006), and Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World (University of California Press, 2018).

Christian Ghasarian is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His first research focused on Réunion Island, where he studied a rural community in the highland and the enacted norms and values of people from South Indian origin in this French Department of the Indian Ocean (1986-1991). His current interests are on multiculturalism in La Réunion, New Age practice in the USA and Europe, and social relations in French Polynesia.

Knut A. Jacobsen is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. Jacobsen’s main research fields are Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Hindu diasporas, and Hindu ideas and rituals of space and time. He is the author or editor of around 40 books. His most recent publications include Yoga in Modern Hinduism (2018), and the edited volumes Handbook of Hinduism in Europe (2020) and Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions (2021), and he is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the six volumes Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Brill, 2009-2015).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.