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A Conversation about Joanne Waghorne’s Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World
Organizer: Jennifer B. Saunders, Denison University
Chair: John S. Hawley, Barnard College
Discussant: Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Syracuse University
Joanne Waghorne’s Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World focuses on Hindu middle class temple building. This award-winning book makes several contributions to religious studies, including a reevaluation of the supposed oxymoron of “urban religion” and much of Weber’s thesis on modernity and religion. She innovatively pairs the history of temple building in Chennai with global processes explained by world systems and transnational theories. Additionally, Waghorne argues that while temple creation and renovation are global activities, the middle class Hindus involved in these projects understand them to be about locality and, therefore, particularity, while fully aware of their interconnectedness to the world. This panel will be a dialogue between Waghorne’s work and panelists’ own research, which benefit from and challenge her theoretical lenses. Major themes connecting the panelists’ research with Waghorne’s include the increasing activity of the Hindu middle class and their reinvention and reconstruction of traditions both inside and outside India. Several papers address Waghorne’s understanding of how locality interacts with global processes. The shifting contexts of the Hindu middle classes provide unique opportunities to study a set of vibrant traditions. Yet, because of these communities’ continued rootedness in locality, each panelist will provide a unique perspective on different historical periods, regions, and religious traditions. Joanne Waghorne will respond to panelists and update us on interesting changes she observed during her 2004 visit to Chennai. This conversation will provide a model for how scholars can address the shifting influences of globalization in religious life.
Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the Middle Class Appropriation of a Vaisnava Holy Site in Late 19th-century Bengal
Jason D. Fuller, DePauw University
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century an emerging middle-class intelligentsia, consisting of British-educated doctors, lawyers, teachers, petty merchants, civil servants and landowners, turned its organizational attention to the reformation and revitalization of Vaisnavism in colonial Bengal. Chief among the middle-class (madhyabitta) revivalists was Bhaktivinoda Thakura, a Bengali magistrate who over the course of thirty years (between 1870 and?1900) all but reinvented what it meant to be a Gaudiya Vaisnava in the modern world. Bhaktivinoda worked tirelessly to develop and/or retrieve a version of Vaisnavism that simultaneously constituted and responded to middle-class values and expectations within the colonial milieu. Among his most notable achievements was the establishment of a pilgrimage center in Mayapura, West Bengal. Although the existing town of Nabadvipa (directly across the river from Mayapura) laid a claim to the birth site of Sri Caitanya, Bhaktivinoda argued that the real holy site was in the small village of Mayapura. In order to authenticate his assertion?Bhaktivinoda marshaled arguments and followed procedures of legitimization redolent of colonial middle-class preoccupations. In my paper I will explore the ways in which Bhaktivinoda Thakura deployed his middle-class cultural capital in an effort to gain acceptance and support for the building of a temple in Mayapura. Critical attention will be paid to the ways in which the recent class-theoretical work of Joanne Waghorne both illumines and yet is challenged by the model of religious production established by middle-class Vaisnavas in nineteenth-century Bengal.
Localization Reconsidered at a Goddess Temple in Upstate New York
Corinne Dempsey, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
Joanne Waghorne's Diaspora of the Gods, abundant in its description of middle class Hindu temples worldwide, provides a lens that bids us to view familiar territory in new ways. My paper will be a reconsideration of a goddess temple in Rush, NY, in light of Waghorne's discussion of locality within global Hinduism. Of particular interest is the notion that localization has not only to do with a temple's regional and sectarian focus but with intimate access to divine power. (Based on earlier work with Christian sainthood in south India, this makes perfect sense although I never made the connection.) I will explore how the Rush goddess' widely acclaimed reputation for power localizes and particularizes in ways that support and conflict with the temple's ethnic Sri Lankan focus. I will also ask how these localizing forces support and conflict with the temple's universalizing strains such as its Sri Vidya tradition and its indebtedness to "science." While Rush temple devotees' intimate connection with a great goddess' power supports trends among middle class urban devotees as described by Waghorne, it breaks with patterns that typically assign amman goddesses or Murugan to this relationship. This exception to the rule I believe has to do with the temple founder's unique democratizing style that encourages congregational worship and opens Vedic priestly roles to women and non-brahmans. By highlighting these trends and exceptions, forging connections between features I earlier had considered unrelated, I hope to reach a deeper understanding of both particular and general temple processes.
Local Transnational Hindus and Private Religious Practices in a Global World
Jennifer B. Saunders, Denison University
Joanne Punzo Waghorne’s work on the religious practices of urban, middle class Hindus as exemplified in Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World has influenced my own research from the very beginning. Her call to pay attention to Hindus who are not religious elites nor villagers practicing “authentic” religious traditions, but who are involved in the messiness of modernity, media, markets, and migration, is one I have taken seriously in my ethnographic research on the religious narratives of transnational Hindus. While urban, middle class Hindus are difficult to study because they exist in the fluid nexuses of shifting time, space, and influence, they epitomize experiences of colonialism and globalization and, in many ways, reflect the reality of much of the world’s population today. Waghorne’s use of world systems theory puts the religious worlds she analyzes into a larger context. My focus on theories of transnational communities adds to this work and follows Waghorne’s important contributions to our understanding of the ways that global and local processes interact and inform each other. Additionally, the temples she writes about are public statements about their middle class donors, devotees, and members. With my concern about the private and semi-private everyday religious expressions of transnational Hindus, our work complements each other’s to form a broader picture of the religious lives of members of this community and help us understand the ways that local communities are able to exercise their agency with global implications.
Localism, Universalisms, and Nationalisms in Hindu California
Shana Sippy, Columbia University
In her work, Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in a Middle-Class World, Joanne Waghorne tackles the question of what transnationalism truly means for Hindus living in this increasingly globalized world. Through in depth study of temples and their deities, Waghorne asserts that a new type of “global localism,” distinct from other universalizing processes, characterizes a current trend in Hindu temple building and living. She, like many other scholars, finds some comfort in more “local” Hindu articulations as they offer a counter to nationalist variants that have been entangled in a politics and production of hatred. In responding to Waghorne’s book, I will bring her brilliant study, focused on specific temples and deities, into conversation with fieldwork in Hindu temples, classrooms, and camps in California. Examining both Hindu nationalist groups (HSS & VHP) in their American context and other non- “nationalist” Hindu formations, such as Hindu temples of the Fijian community, I will consider the rubrics of globalism, localism and universalism, looking more at the pedagogy and discourse of middle-class Hindus than at their deities and architectural constructions. Such a perspective both affirms and challenges some of Waghorne’s assertions about the distinctions between localisms and universalisms. It is my hope that reading Waghorne’s text alongside contemporary fieldwork on Hindus in California will help us learn more about the contemporary practices and processes of middle-class Hindus in the transnational arena and may, unfortunately, raise questions about how much comfort can really be found in the global-local.