The Status of People with Disabilities in the Profession Committee (PWD) will host a luncheon for scholars and students with disabilities, as well as anyone interested in disability issues in the Academy. The luncheon will offer opportunities for mentoring and informal connections with colleagues.
Religious education at the college, university, and graduate school levels means different things in different settings. Religiously-affiliated schools may see everything they do as contributing to religious formation. Other types of institutions may offer opportunities for students to learn about diverse religious traditions without linking religious studies to faith. Faculty and administrators in both types of schools may wonder what strategies and techniques might best support their religious education goals. This session will provide a forum for facilitated conversation about contemporary theories of religious education, as well as specific teaching and learning practices that participants have found effective in their contexts. College administrators responsible for curriculum and/or student formation, instructors of religion interested in improving their teaching skills, and faculty whose portfolios explicitly include religious education courses are all welcome to participate (and bring lunch).
The Dead Sea Scrolls community of scholars will gather to remember Weston Fields (1948-2023). Please join us as friends and colleagues share reflections on Weston's life and his work for the advancement of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
How does working with the dead/ancestors offer us opportunities to mourn and cleanse ourselves? Maria Osunbimpe Hamilton Abegunde, Solimar Otero, and Elizabeth Pérez--each initiated into òrìṣà (orisha) traditions--explore relationships between the living and the dead, rites of ingestion and re-memory, and their healing of historical/intergenerational wounds. Using literature, poetic inquiry, and autoethnography, they share how and why “eating” the dead ritually can transfigure wounds into sacred sites for becoming whole. Abegunde approaches writing as ritual, catharsis, mourning, prayer, and a path to acknowledge (and release) anger and fear embodied from personal and inter/trans/generational violence in Black communities. Otero’s paper demonstrates that the Black Atlantic dead are historically, culturally, and ritually entangled with female entities that watch over the decay and the transformation of remains. Pérez contributes an autoethnographic meditation on writing _The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract_ (2022) in the midst of severe gastrointestinal and sociopolitical distress.
The panel reflects on the lived aspects of Adivasi religions as Adivasi communities encounter modernity while navigating issues of marginality while maintaining their traditional legacies. It speaks to Adivasis’ agency in adapting their religious practices while being conscious of their interlocutors as they aspire for recognition. The process of recognition also renders transformations, codifications, and systematization of Adivasi religions in response to challenges posed by development and neoliberalism. Despite these transformations, Adivasis maintain an affective relationship with their gods through rich oral and performative traditions, now finding new locations, meanings, and histories as they encounter new audiences and interlocutors. Presenters bring forth the dynamic nature of Adivasi religious traditions, their fluidity in socio-political change, and their critical importance for practitioners.
Adivasis are agitating for constitutional recognition of their religion through the addition of a Sarna Code to the census. Focusing on the Chotanagpur region and the Sarna religion, I discuss the ways in which traditional Adivasi religion is being reformulated and reconstructed in response to political pressures that necessitate solidarity among tribes. I argue that by framing their traditional religious beliefs and practices in ways that appeal to modern concerns and values, Sarna Adivasis make their faith central to their identity and demonstrate their ability to contribute to the wellbeing of society precisely by virtue of remaining a set-apart community.
The paper focuses on the sacred narratives of Bhil religions both as lived modern practices and as a method in Adivasi representation of their traditions. The internal dimension of lived religion and the external dimension of representation are products of Adivasi engagements with their interlocutors and their interactions with the larger South Asian religious world. Here, Adivasi religious practices find new locations for performance and local scholars construct innovative histories to claim indigeneity. Using textual and ethnographic material collected from the Bhil Adivasi communities of Gujarat and Rajasthan, the paper further argues how such new locations and creative histories are inflected by global discourses of indigeneity, Hindu devotionalism, and people’s desire for leisure and consumption.
Pithoras are arguably the most emblematic tokens of Adivasi tradition in eastern Chhotaudepur District, Gujarat, and western Alirajpur District, Madhya Pradesh. They are wall paintings, but they are not just wall paintings; they are also devs. This paper will resist a conception of tradition that sets it in opposition to modernity and steer instead toward a conception of tradition as a process involving “the creation of the future out of the past” (Henry Glassie, Elliott Oring; cf. also Greg Urban). It will examine the ways in which the composition, production, celebration, use, and reception of Pithoras has been changing in the twenty-first century, along with changing material and cultural circumstances, including changes that might plausibly be called modernization. Despite these changes, Pithoras remain recognizable as traditional, as can be seen by contrasting them with works by Adivasi artists that employ traditional motifs in ways that seem modern.
From foods to drinks to drugs, tantric practitioners have long used substances for spiritual, mental, and physical transformation. These substances are used in a controlled and intentional manner, and their effects are considered as a tool for growth and transformation rather than escapism. In this panel, we explore the internal arguments for the use of such substances and the ritual outcomes of their use, including the symbolic nature of consumption, internal justifications for the use of transgressive substances, and development of ingestion across religious traditions. We examine the sometimes exoticized practices found in tantra through detailed and philosophical explorations that seek to de-emphasize the sensational elements of taboo consumption and instead better understand how practitioners themselves justify and understand their use. We investigate the transformative power these substances have on practices through their own conversion into ritual items and examine expanded ideas of religiosity that go beyond everyday temple worship.
The potently psychoactive plant Datura Metel appears across of range of traditions in premodern South Asia preserved in texts. Among those traditions is the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yogini tantras, the last textual strata of that tradition. In Vajrayāna works the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about vaśīkaraṇa, domination of another. This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts, and also by comparing modern ethnographic studies that detail how the plant continues to be used in traditional settings, especially in Nepal and Himalayan India.
This paper analyzes the consumption of “servings” or “helpings” (Bengali sebā, from Sanskrit sevā “service”) among Bāul Fakirs and Fakiranis who occupy spaces at the social fringes of Bengali Islamic village and urban contexts. The first part of the paper introduces how the idea of sebā in Bangla came to refer to sharing food, drink, a ritual mixture of cannabis known as siddhi, and in esoteric contexts also bodily fluids, and how this connects with “mainstream” cultural ideas of consumption. The second part of the paper analyzes the cosmological background of sebā, including its role with regard to the spiritual teacher (guru or murshid) and the concept of the Light of the Prophet (Nur Muhammad) within the human body. The final part of the paper highlights social stigmas that practitioners face by adhering to certain forms of sebā and also raises ethical questions that surround some modalities of Tantric sebā.
One thread of tantric Buddhist practice is the consumption of the “five meats:” cow, dog, elephant, horse, and human. By eating these meats, a practitioner violated the social and religious norms of their day, embodying an ability to think beyond the dualistic fixations of normal life. The requirement to eat these meats, however, presented a clear tension to tantric practitioners who were also vegetarian. In this paper, I will argue that Tibetan thinkers used two broad arguments to resolve this tension.
In the first, authors insist that the requirement to consume the five meats applies only within specific rituals contexts, not in daily life. The second argument some authors try to resolve this tension is by minimizing the five meats within the ritual itself, either by insisting that the meat in question has been transformed it into divine nectar or that the amounts involved should be minutely small.
This paper explores how the consumption of ritually prepared substances leads to a perfected body by focusing on the alchemical works of Sanskrit South Asia. Here we find the ingestion by mercury of plant, mineral, metal, and gems in its purification process which then leads to consumption by practitioners seeking long life, health, and enlightenment. The presentation will explore the preparation of alchemical medicines by looking at gendered notions of substances, how those notions must conform to the gender of the user, the appetite of mercury itself, and the purification systems in place to allow patients to consume potentially lethal products safely.
This roundtable session gathers three esteemed scholars in the overlapping fields of History, Feminist studies, Lesbian/Queer studies, and African American religious theological studies to converse with Monique Moultre, author of Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership (Duke University Press, 2022). Heralded as “pioneering and beautifully written” and a “volume full of wisdom, insight, and power,” Hidden Histories offers new scholarly models for understanding leadership, authenticity, Black religions, social activism and the distinct intersectional barriers faced by Black lesbian faith leaders. The discussion will focus on the scholarly contribution and social justice impact of Hidden Histories, the first book of its kind to center on the spirituality and faith leadership of Black lesbian clergy and religious leaders.
