240509 SE Ritual flows and recomposition with a special focus on South and South-east Asia (P2, P3, P4) (2019W)

Aim
The aim of this course is to introduce students to recent forms of ritual practices that have appeared in the world, more particularly in South and South-east Asia; ritual recomposition include here transformation, reinterpretation, and new values given to ritual practices or to their components. The course will focus on the context from which these rituals emerged, and on the mechanisms allowing their recomposition, in particular ‘flows’ of people, practices and ideas.

Students will
• acquire knowledge on recent developments of religious practices in South and South-east Asia, and on the conditions of their emergence, in particular in relation to ‘modernity’;
• acquire knowledge on the social anthropological study of these rituals, and how they take place in the social anthropology of religion

Description
The course will focus on various recent forms given to rituals in South and South-east Asia. Ritual recomposition or reconfiguration is approached as a part of societal dynamics, both local and global, as well as of ethnic, social, politics and economic dynamics. Two types of ritual transformation will be discussed in the course:
- Ritual ‘creation’ and New Religious Movements;
- Reinterpretation and relocation of rituals
The course will focus on the conditions of emergence of ritual recomposition: firstly, the context, that is to say the social, political, economic and global factors leading to ritual recomposition with a particular focus on mobility of people and ideas (or ‘flows’); and secondly the agents and the ‘audience’ of recomposed rituals.
The study of ‘recomposed rituals’ will be placed in the wider theoretical context of the study of ritual and religion in social and cultural anthropology and continuities and discontinuities with older approaches will be discussed. The case study will come from Northeast India, Nepal and in various parts of south-east Asia (Vietnam, Singapore, Korea).

Method
Seminar with visual and textual material in English.