Constructing Identities, Constructing Spaces

The term “pan-Indianism” is recognizable, yet the concept itself is unstable and remains undertheorized. The term has been associated with different time periods, geographic locations, movements, organizations, and practices. Despite this ambiguity, pan-Indianism remains consistently associated with urban spaces. This association is no accident but rather the result of a particular area of scholarship known as Acculturation Studies. In its effort to gauge the levels of assimilation within Indigenous communities, this scholarship reinforced assimilationist policies at the time. I argue that the uncritical association of pan-Indianism with urban spaces leaves unexamined colonial ideologies which not only constructed the concept of pan-Indianism but continue to obscure the centrality of land within Indigenous religious traditions today. By critically examining pan-Indianism’s association with urbanization and assimilation, we refuse assimilationist rhetoric and Indigenous erasure and can center Indigenous religious traditions in the ongoing work to reconceptualize urban spaces and decolonize land.

Following the Chinese central government’s concern with secularization and securitization of religious spaces, local governments started to require planting Chinese flags in churches, mosques, and temples all across the country’s cities. The campaign is controversial, because the Chinese flag law requires the flag to be flown only in places of national significance and representation. In this paper, I explore how this controversy unfolded in a small Chinese ethnic Muslim town. The Party official demanded to erect the flag in front of the mosque so as to supposedly balance overwhelmingly religious atmosphere with symbols of patriotism and nationalism. By drawing attention to the visual and symbolic logics of his reasoning, I compare him to a traditional geomancer and identify his practice with an art of political fengshui. The instance is thus illustrative of the geomantic production of Chinese secularism.

The paper explores the myriad ways in which religion and urbanity interact as they develop and expand within Benares. While the colonial and nationalist writings allocated a homogenous Hindu identity to Benares, Jain sources depict it as a dynamic and cosmopolitan space. Using inscriptional records, a fourteenth-century narrative by the Swetambara Jain monk Jinprabha Suri and a sixteenth-century autobiography by the Srimal Jain merchant Banarasidas, an attempt is made to enquire into the Jain religious, educational, and commercial participation in early modern Benares. The merchants played a crucial role in developing a ‘sacred’ space through interconnected worlds of commerce, piety, and knowledge. This paper aims to locate such spaces of negotiations, conflicts, inclusions and exclusions, and appropriation by a minority community to study its role in shaping the city’s identity. Through this research, I argue that spaces cannot be static entities and are subject to constant mutation and change.

Much of the news surrounding parishioner temples or their larger governing bodies in Japan is dire: the decline and shuttering of temples, decreases in participation, and disinterest in religion. However, this presentation will look at “alternative” religious spaces in contemporary Japan and the women who craft and sustain them. In particular, it will look at the creation of a women’s group at the nuns’ training hall in Kyoto as an example of women’s active labor to craft religious spaces for themselves beyond and in addition to their parishioner temples. Their activities take place in cities, where women with similar interests can find each other and labor together for Buddhism. At the same time, these spaces are precarious and without constant, dedicated labor, they collapse. This paper will conclude with a consideration of the meaning of “alternative” in women’s places of belonging that contributes to this precarity.