Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

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.

Art Theology is a method that engages in making art in order to make new knowledge and understanding about theological ideas that discursive reasoning alone cannot provide.  Art Theology includes seeing art (with intention), but it is even more importantly about making art.  Art Theology is an interdisciplinary method grounded in the scholarship of art historians, Susanna Berger and Eyelet Evens-Ezra who have demonstrated that we have not fully understood theologians and philosophers before the 18th century because we overlooked their visual thinking.  The method is also grounded in the emerging cognitive science of The Extended Mind Theory.  Art Theology centers indigenous wisdom like matauranga Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand, that has never overlooked making in knowing.  This paper provides the research behind the workshop offered by the Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit: Art Theology, Non-Violence, and Wisdom from the Margins.

I have explored practices of improvisation not only as spiritual practices, but as enacted and embodied theology. For example, art and improvisation can be understood through theologies of co-creating with God, of responding to God, and of understanding creation as both human and divine. I focused on musical and dance improvisation and would welcome this opportunity to delve into the visual arts as theology. My current work centers practices of deep listening in community-engaged scholarship. This work continues to attend to dynamics of improvisation in order to pay attention to “wisdom from the margins” through listening and responding, co-creating, and engaging in practices that center belonging, compassion, and attunement over extractive methods of gathering information. This work takes time, space, and slowing down, all practices offered through Art Theology that could also serve to guide academic and ethnographic work in kinder and more attuned ways.

Here is the link to my CV: 1 Page CV_Grant Showalter Swanson.docx

This paper offers a close reading of The People v. Chin Mook Sow, an 1876 California murder trial. Chin Mook Sow was one of several cases from the late-19th century in which the “dying declarations” of Chinese laborers were challenged because of their alleged lack of belief in an eternal system of rewards and punishment. The Chin Mook Sow court engaged in an extended inquiry into the content of Chinese religion that ultimately vindicated the victim’s rights. Yet it did so by mobilizing religious and racial logics that worked together to reinforce notions of the Chinese as essentially different. My analysis focuses on what the case reveals about the unfinished project of legal secularism. In wrestling with the implications of proper belief for democratic citizenship, the court's inquiry revealed the theological presuppositions that continued to buttress U.S. law even as it was being stripped of its explicitly religious underpinnings.

This paper examines the interplay between the secular and religious dimensions of the "Festival of Inspirations" at the Swaminarayan Hindu temple, Akshardham, in NJ, USA. As the largest Hindu temple in the Western hemisphere, Akshardham epitomizes Hindu art, architecture, culture, spirituality, and modern secular facets. Utilizing textual, media, and ethnographic research, this paper illustrates not only the mutual influence of the religious and secular but also the fluid and inseparable nature of these categories, and argues for the theoretical integration of these two categories. It contends that reshaping religious practices to address secular concerns and adapt to changing facets of modernity brings about everyday experiences among practitioners that are simultaneously immanent and transcendent, personal and political. Its data-driven arguments also raise crucial questions within the broader discourse on secularism and secularization, and address them from within the perspective of treating the secular and the religious as fundamentally inseparable theoretical categories.

When Japanese Pure Land Buddhists came to the United States and Hawaii in the late-nineteenth century, they often translated their religion and traditions into the English language so they could be comprehensible to state institutions and cultural observers. Linguistic translations proved necessary for both simple material reasons, such as filling out legal forms and interacting with American society, and also complex ideological reasons, such as rendering religious expressions, practices, and structures in terms consistent with American definitions of religion. This essay argues Pure Land Buddhist translations between Japanese and English were a function of competing transpacific imperial political projects asserting distinct legal definitions of religion and modernity. An analysis of Japanese and English-language Pure Land Buddhist documents and texts from around the turn of the century demonstrates that language and linguistic translation are significant mechanisms of secular governance and societal power to shape foreign communities into legible subjects.

Focusing on competing understandings of the kingdom of God, this paper contrasts the political theologies of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and American senator Josh Hawley. The paper traces the connections between Bonhoeffer and Hawley’s visions of the kingdom of God and their political choices. While Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of God’s kingdom informed his costly repudiation of Christian nationalism in his context, Hawley’s interpretation bolstered his unwavering support for Christian nationalism in his context.    

Despite their very different contexts and styles, there are some striking resonances between Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s late theology and Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011). On the one hand, Bonhoeffer proposes a “view from below”, claiming that “suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action.” On the other hand, Halberstam develops queer theory as “knowledge from below”, which can assist with countering “the logics of success that have emerged from the triumphs of global capitalism.” In this paper, I bring Bonhoeffer’s reflections on suffering and weakness into conversation with Halberstam’s insights into failure. Specifically, I explore how Halberstam’s work might help to supplement and radicalise some of Bonhoeffer’s reflections in his late theology.

In contemporary soteriological discourse, several voices have raised the concern that atonement theologies that assume divine justice has a retributive element end up justifying violence.  Though this may be the case in some instances, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology and ethics present a more complicated picture.  While Bonhoeffer presumed retributive justice was operative in God’s saving work in Christ, this never resulted in an outright justification of his work in the resistance. 

This talk addresses the religio-racial transformation of “the whiteness project” through the machinery of antiracism and anti-antisemitism. It turns to the mid-twentieth martyr-theologian and ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, glimpsing this machinery in his late writings to imagine a postfascist Western future. That future entailed subjecting Jewishness to whitening, thereby figuring Jews no longer as targets (traditional supersession) but now agents (a new supersessionism) of Christian (post)colonial empire. This is Bonhoeffer’s unwitting renewal of “the religion of whiteness” (W. E. B. Du Bois), where in its distinction from and yet relation to “white people” whiteness is a locution for planet-wide racial capitalism. Imagined now as racially “plastic,” Jews are hailed into the West’s civilizational project while Jewishness becomes a site for Western post-Holocaust self-renewal. With the term “Judeo-Christianity,” I sketch how this maneuver works in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics to illuminate the religio-racial terms of the present, including the current crisis in Palestine.

“Fasting” 齋 was central to early Chinese ritual practice, whether in preparation for sacrificing to the spirits or other occasions of ritual significance. In this paper, I propose to examine the practices that gather about this imperative to “fast” (often written with the allograph 齊). Ritual fasting involved not only the proscription of various activities (social engagement and other sources of pleasure and distraction) but also contemplative elements that have not drawn as much scholarly attention. Drawing primarily on the Liji 禮記, I will discuss the details and practical logic of ritual fasting as well as its relationship to contemporaneous practices of inner cultivation.

Confucian philosophers within the lineage of pattern-principle learning perceived quiet-sitting meditation as a pivotal philosophical exercise in the broader pursuit of self-cultivation. Cheng Yi considered quiet-sitting among various contemplative practices that fostered reverence, a virtue crucial for discerning and engaging with the pattern-principles inherent in the world. Yang Shi underscored quiet-sitting as a foundational and primary step in self-cultivation, attributing significant philosophical importance to this practice. Zhu Xi aimed to amalgamate the perspectives of Cheng and Yang, elucidating his understanding of quiet-sitting through three stages of his philosophical journey: initially dismissing its significance, later valuing it as the fundamental practice of reverence, and eventually regarding it on par with other contemplative practices, reverting to Cheng Yi’s stance. As the practice and its broader implications were deeply intertwined with ongoing intellectual dialogues concerning virtuous human existence within the pattern-principle tradition, the act of Confucian quiet-sitting inherently embodies philosophical dimensions.

With a focus on the quiet-sitting meditation of major Neo-Confucian figure Zhu Xi (1130-1200), this paper aims to shed new light on Zhu’s contemplative practice by adopting a comparative theological method. More specifically, it follows the interpretations of Zhu’s quiet-sitting put forth by Chinese Jesuit theologian Hu Guozhen (1948-) in his work to “inculturate” Christian prayer for fellow Chinese Catholics. Whether simply through oversight or because his study of Zhu on this topic was motivated by different concerns than those of most scholars, Hu’s reading of Zhu Xi has not been noted in contemporary scholarship; however, this paper argues his novel approach can help us think in fresh ways about Zhu’s quiet-sitting practice—especially its flexible approach to cultivating “reverence” as opposed to pursuing mental tranquility through strict techniques, and its relation to other practices like reading.

This talk will share some of the findings from research I conducted in two upper-level seminars that I recently taught at two different Midwestern liberal arts colleges in which I included Confucian contemplative practices as modes of experiential learning. These seminars surveyed and analyzed contemplative practices primarily from an array of Asian traditions, but I also included case studies of both religions and modern, secular, and hybridized traditions in the West. An aim of this IRB-approved research is to assess the pedagogical effectiveness of using contemplative pedagogy as a form of experiential learning. The two Confucian contemplative techniques that I included as components of contemplative pedagogy in these seminars were quiet-sitting meditation and self-examination/self-monitoring. I will report on aspects of what students accomplished both inside and outside the classroom relating to these Confucian practices, on the data I collected and analyzed from students, and on the preliminary findings concerning their effectiveness, as types of experiential learning, in enhancing student learning.