This session aims to explore the significant contributions of the anthropological perspective to Jain Studies, highlighting the work of both emerging and senior scholars who have conducted extensive fieldwork in India. Ethnographic methods and anthropological concepts have played a constitutive role in shaping the field of Jain Studies. Participants will reflect on how these approaches have influenced their own scholarship and fieldwork with Jain communities, fostering understanding of Jain society and practice. In light of the recent passing of anthropologist Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb, this panel also serves as a tribute to the influence of his scholarship and enduring legacy in the field. Through engaging overlaps and intersections of anthropology and Jain Studies around positionality in the field, ritual culture and practice, social organization, and theory, this conversation aims to stimulate critical dialogue and inspire fresh insights into the changing dynamics of Jain culture and society and its academic study.
The study of the Jains was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s when anthropologists and fieldwork oriented scholars in other fields turned their attention to contemporary Jain communities. Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb was a key person in this turn in Jain Studies, beginning with his fieldwork on Jain ritual transactions in Ahmedabad in 1986 and Jaipur in 1990-91, leading to his 1996 Absent Lord. For many of these scholars, fieldwork with Jains was their starting point in the study of South Asia. Babb, however, brought two decades of previous scholarship to his study of the Jains, having previously engaged in fieldwork on Hindu rituals in Chhattisgarh, Singapore and Delhi. This paper looks at this earlier scholarship, arguing the advantages for a fuller understanding of Babb’s scholarship on the Jains, and Jain studies as a whole, of situating Absent Lord and Babb’s subsequent scholarship on the Jains within this longer arc.
This paper revisits the works of Max Weber, particularly The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism alongside his Religions of India, to ask what is at stake in comparing the Jains to other groups. As Alan Babb has argued, Weber never actually asserts that the Jains are the Protestants of India; nevertheless, the comparison persists. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2018-2023, attention is then drawn to vernacular practices of comparison between Jains and other foreign groups by Jains and non-Jains alike: comparisons that often involve a theological dimension, but rest on sociological assumptions about both Jains and the nature of commerce itself. These comparisons reveal the continuing salience of the caste category baniya, glossed by the Subaltern Studies scholar David Hardiman as “usurer,” for understanding contemporary Jain communities, as well as the economic system that they are the “spirit” of.
This paper aims to explore the intersection of religious sites, tourism, and Jains in Jaipur to demonstrate the emerging trend of spiritual tourism within contemporary Jainism. While both religion and tourism have independently flourished in Jaipur and have been extensively studied across various contexts and methodologies, their symbiotic relationship remains relatively underexplored. Drawing from my fieldwork in Jaipur and building on the works of anthropologist Lawrence Babb, this paper proposes to discuss “spiritual tourism,” a third ideology. This ideology motivates an increasing number of Jains to engage in religious practices and its growing significance in the social, devotional, and economic lives of the Jains in Jaipur. Through this investigation, the paper also seeks to underpin the impact of such phenomenon on the individual and collective identities of religious groups within the broader framework of South Asian traditions.
Because of the Durkheimian idea of ritual space set apart, the domestic has been largely excluded or described in limited terms as a space of ritual possibility. This raises questions about gendered participation in ritual innovation. Formative schematic theorizations of Jain ritual emphasize practices such as puja that are sited in the temple. Sallekhanā, the voluntary Jain fast until death, is a continuation of renunciation of food and effacement of the embodied self that begins in a plethora of small quotidian acts within the domestic space, making the seemingly dramatic withdrawal from life a conceptual continuity with everyday ritualization. Ritual dispersal in everyday life entails vulnerability which is differently embodied and distributed across age and gender within family and household. This paper proposes that gendered norms of ritualization and ritual pedagogy in the domestic sphere, exemplified in the practice of sallekhanā, demand a rethinking of the boundaries of Jain ritual.
While theoretically casteless, Jain participation in and development of caste identities, especially as vaiśyas, has been well-documented. Alan Babb’s 2004 Alchemies of Violence, for example, studied the development of Marwari Jain trader caste identity, typically in contradistinction to Brahman and Kshatriya caste identity. This study examines the development of four relatively new gotras that trace their origin from Śvetāmbar yatis, a special category of monks that follow an alternative interpretation of Jain monastic conduct. Some yatis, or former-yatis according to some, were known to take wives and father children. These children inherited their monastic parentage’s property, maintained the social networks of their predecessors, and continued their ritual practices. The existence of these gotras creates tension among yati monks and the broader Jain community by forcing them to consider the caste status of someone who walks back their renunciation and to deal with the social implications of their renewed worldly life.