The social and cultural life of a virus has a lot to teach us about the human, the nonhuman world, and the power inequalities in 21st century Asia. In March 2020, the Religion and Globalisation cluster started a research initiative called “Religious responses to Covid-19 and ritual innovations”. As one of our first activities, we launched the research blog “CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19”, inspired by the creative ways in which people in Mumbai and scroll-painters in Bengal adopted mythological tools to represent Corona (in the form of a demon, or asur).

The blog includes contributions from religion scholars and anthropologists, but also community members, leaders and activists, in a way that is less elitist and more immediate than an academic journal. The editors took turns to translate from Asian languages in order to integrate reflections from Chinese Buddhist teachers, Bangladeshi folklorists, Indonesian theology lecturers, and other non-English speakers, whose crucial agency and intellectual perspectives are often absent from Anglocentric academic publications.

Our research blog attracted over 50,000 readers and 100 contributions. It has grown into a veritable living archive of fresh empirical data to observe and document diverse pandemic transformations at the interface of religion and society in Asia and beyond.

Important topics that have emerged from the blog posts include the relation between religion, new media, the body sensorium, a reconfiguration of sacred/profane spaces, and conflicting epistemologies of healing in the ways religious and secular communities address the etiology of zoonotic diseases. After one year from its start, CoronAsur is publishing new contributions every week and it is currently being used by several university lecturers for readings and students’ assignments across the globe.

The CoronAsur Project was supported by the ARI Collaborative Grant “Religion Going Viral” (August 2020 – April 2021; Principal Investigator: Carola Lorea) and matching funding kindly provided through the Yale-NUS College Yap Kim Hao fund. Collaborators and Editoral Board Members: All Religion and Globalisation Cluster members, including previous Cluster members Dr Natalie Lang and Dr Nan Ouyang.

PI & Co-PI(s): Kenneth Dean, Carola Lorea, Fabian Graham, Nan Ouyang, Natalie Lang, Ning Ning Chen, Ying Ruo Show, Alicia Chan, Emily Hertzman & Erica M. Larson 
NUS Team: Clair Hurford & Henry Kwan

Funding Agency: Asia Research Institute, NUS & Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund for Comparative Religious Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Project Duration: March 2020 – March 2022