142157 SE Popular Hinduism: Material Religion in South Asia (2026S)

Religious life in South Asia is deeply embedded in everyday material and sensory worlds. Hindu practices unfold through images, objects, sounds, bodily techniques, spatial arrangements, and increasingly through digital environments. Rather than approaching Hinduism primarily through texts or doctrines, this course foregrounds religion as it is practiced, experienced, circulated, and contested in daily life.

In this seminar, we examine Popular Hinduism through the perspective of material religion, with particular attention to the media through which religious meanings take form. We explore a wide range of material and mediated practices, from temples, icons, ritual substances, pilgrimage sites, clothing, food, and embodied techniques, to reproducible media such as posters, prints, calendars, recordings, film, and television, and finally to contemporary digital formats including social media, apps, and online devotional platforms.

The course is partly connected to ongoing research conducted within the ERC Synergy Project MANTRAMS – Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. Students will engage with recently produced fieldwork material, including visual, audiovisual, and digital data emerging from current research. This provides insight into how scholarly knowledge is generated and allows students to work with empirical material that is still in the process of analysis and interpretation.

The course introduces ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches to lived religion in South Asia. Central questions include how material and media forms shape religious authority, presence, affect, and power, and how these processes intersect with broader social dynamics such as caste, gender, politics, and economy.

Teaching takes place in the format of an interactive seminar, with input from the instructor alongside informed discussion of readings and the collective analysis of visual, material, and digital sources by all participants.