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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220209T160000
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SUMMARY:Caste Marketing: How Hindu Rituals Sell Brahminical Supremacy
DESCRIPTION:“Caste marketing” can be understood in several ways: a description of how companies market products based on a caste profile of their users or “caste” groups as targeted market. This lecture will focus on the latter and delve into the ways Hindu ritual websites embed savarna (dominant-caste) focused terms\, symbols\, deities\, rituals\, and ideas into their websites such that they become digital repositories of “caste ideology” (Jaiswal 1998). In this sense\, collectively\, these ritual websites become another form of what Thenmozhi Soundarajan has called “digital brahminism”. The terms “caste” and “brahmin” do not appear on these sites\, rather we see “Vedic” and “pandit” appealing to the sense of “caste innocence” held by many liberal\, dominant caste members of South Asian/Hindu diaspora communities. This research shows how Hindu ritual websites use these subtle caste markers to reinforce savarna Hindu traditions as an unmarked “normal” (casteless). \n  \nEvent Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia \n  \n\nDr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She is a scholar of ritual\, nationalism\, and digital culture in South Asia. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms\, social media\, apps\, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Specifically\, she is interested in how online mechanisms of meaning-making like hashtags operate through the aggregation of capital\, relying on power\, privilege\, and access to be successful. Much of her work thinks about the savarna logics of virtual platforms and how caste-oppressed\, Adivasi\, and minority religious communities are characterized\, minimized\, and effaced within these spaces. Her current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma: The Making of a Global Hindu Brand examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new\, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis\, effectively “branding” religious identities through a neoliberal “Vedicizing” of virtual spaces. \n  \n[gravityform id=”119″ title=”false” description=”false”]
URL:https://religion.ucla.edu/event/caste-marketing-how-hindu-rituals-sell-brahminical-supremacy/
LOCATION:Zoom
ORGANIZER;CN="Center for the Study of Religion":MAILTO:csr@humnet.ucla.edu
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220222T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220222T130000
DTSTAMP:20220222T163523Z
CREATED:20220106T195300Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220222T163523Z
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SUMMARY:Hearing the Listeners: Jain Perspectives from India’s Islamic Past. A Conversation with Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke\, moderated by Alka Patel
DESCRIPTION:Perhaps uniquely in South Asia\, Jains wrote voluminously about their interactions with Muslim rulers from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire. Their writings present us with unparalleled views of these rulers and the social\, cultural\, and religious transformations taking place throughout the 13th to 17th centuries. This period of history is hotly contested today\, as the Hindu Right seeks to de-legitimize India’s commitment to secularism and deny India’s Muslim population a place in the nation. In this conversation\, historians Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke will discuss how their readings of Jain sources composed in these centuries have shaped their understanding of India’s past—and present—by paying attention to what Jains living in those times said about Muslim rulers\, interreligious relations\, and their own changing identities. Art Historian Alka Patel will moderate and show how studying Jain and Muslim built spaces can give us a richer understanding of the interactions between these two religious communities. \n  \nEvent Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia \n  \n  \nSteven M. Vose is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Colorado College (Colorado Springs). His research focuses on the formation of Jain communities in (and from) western India from the late medieval period to the present. His first book\, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge\, forthcoming) won the 2020 Edward C. Dimock\, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). He is currently working on a study of how globalization and neoliberalism affect identity formation in transnational Jain communities. (Twitter: @StevenMVose) \n  \n  \n  \n Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark\, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural\, imperial\, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books\, most recently\, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press\, January 2021). Audrey believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower\, so you can find her on Twitter (@audreytruschke). She is currently working on a single volume history of India\, spanning 4\,600 years\, with the support of a NEH Public Scholars grant. \n  \n  \n Alka Patel is Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her research has focused on South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia\, including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004)\, Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean (2004)\, India and Iran in the Longue Durée (Brill\, 2017)\, and a guest-edited special issue on reuse in South Asian visual culture in Archives of Asian Art (2007). Patel co-edited Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (with K. Leonard\, Brill 2012). Her recent book\, Iran to India: The Shansabanis of Afghanistan (Edinburgh 2021)\, is the first of a two-volume study that analyzes the firm incorporation of South Asia within the Persianate world. \n  \n  \n  \nRSVP Required for Zoom Access: \n[gravityform id=”120″ title=”false” description=”false”]\n  \n  \n  \n 
URL:https://religion.ucla.edu/event/hearing-the-listeners-jain-perspectives-from-indias-islamic-past-a-conversation-with-steven-m-vose-and-audrey-truschke-moderated-by-alka-patel/
LOCATION:Zoom
ORGANIZER;CN="Center for the Study of Religion":MAILTO:csr@humnet.ucla.edu
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220223T160000
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DTSTAMP:20220222T235607Z
CREATED:20220106T200055Z
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UID:5531-1645632000-1645635600@religion.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:The Jewish Discovery of Islam Revisited
DESCRIPTION:From the oldest European Christian engagements with the Qur’an in the Middle Ages through the advent of modern academic approaches to the Muslim scripture\, scholars have frequently seen qur’anic narratives on the biblical prophets and related subjects as the result of formative Jewish influences on the Prophet Muhammad. This approach to the origins of Islam has become enshrined in modern Qur’anic Studies due to the groundbreaking research of Abraham Geiger in his 1833 work What Has Muhammad Borrowed from Judaism? Although contemporary scholarship has shifted away from the problematic\, reductionist emphasis on “influence” that once characterized research on biblical narratives in the Qur’an\, Geiger’s role as a bridge figure between medieval ecclesiastical polemical discourse and the modern discipline of Qur’anic Studies has yet to be fully explored and appreciated. In this talk\, Michael Pregill will discuss Geiger’s context and methodology\, and posit that many of Geiger’s insights about the Jewish sources of qur’anic themes and episodes are still valuable for contemporary scholarship—including\, paradoxically\, in those cases when Geiger is actually wrong. \n  \nEvent Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies  \n  \nMichael E. Pregill is a scholar of comparative religion\, focusing on the scriptural cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Much of his research focuses on the reception of biblical\, Jewish\, and Christian traditions in the Qur’an and Islam. His monograph The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture\, Polemic\, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford University Press\, 2020) is the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Textual Studies). He is currently a lecturer at Chapman University in Orange\, California; a visiting scholar at the Dornsife School of Religion at the University of Southern California; and a postdoctoral fellow of the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an\,’ pursuing a new project entitled “Re-Orienting Geiger: Revisiting the Jewish Foundations of Western Qur’anic Studies.” \n  \n  \n  \n[gravityform id=”121″ title=”false” description=”false”]
URL:https://religion.ucla.edu/event/the-jewish-discovery-of-islam-revisited/
LOCATION:Haines 39/Zoom
ORGANIZER;CN="Center for the Study of Religion":MAILTO:csr@humnet.ucla.edu
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