Dear all,

I am looking for a couple of papers for a panel I am organizing for the EASR 2022 conference  that will be held in Cork (South-Eastern Ireland),  27 June - 1 July 2022. 

The panel's (provisional) title is Tantra at the "Periphery" of Monsoon Asia: Freedom to Overcome Natural Laws

Description: Tantra is religious phenomenon that spreads across Monsoon Asia around the middle of the first millennium CE. It influenced Hindu and non-Hindu traditions highlighting not only on phenomena as enlightenment, illumination, liberation and salvation from the chains of the human world but also on worldly self-realization through the most extreme ritual praxis—which involves blood and sexual rites as well as their metaphoric and metonymic translation in praxis through the use of vegetal and floral elements. These religious practices often intersected Tantra to the understudied “magic-shamanic” performances in Monsoon Asia, a field too often understudied in modern Indology.
Usually, “magic-shamanic” performances lead the tantric practitioners to both states of bliss, ecstasy, possession, trance, and the obtainment of shapeshifting abilities, healing capacities, and mastering “white” and “black” magic powers (using spells ad manipulating natural substances). Hence, the adepts through the mediation of male or female gurus are able to overcome the chains of the world’s natural order and to realize their own desires.
This panel’s papers—following the research path of previous panels on Tantra organized at the EASR conference 2020 in Tartu and 2021 in Pisa—engages with a multidisciplinary approach, considering two or more disciplines such as, but not limited to, textual studies, history, art history and archaeology, ethnography and anthropology, folk studies, religious studies, etc. The main aim of this panel is to shed light on Tantra as a cross-cultural or transcultural phenomenon, which culminated in peculiar regional and local cults. Furthermore, the dialectic between the “centre(s)” and the “peripheries” will be analyzed in order to investigate the socio-political overlapping of Indic and tribal traditions in the formation of tantric cults across Monsoon Asia.

In case you are interested,  please write to me by 10th December (before 3 p.m.  GMT+1 time zone) your name, position, a title and an abstract (max 300 words altogether - please strictly respect this limit).

I know there is no so much time, but I would like to complete one of the two pre-arranged sessions. If you have an abstract please email me as soon as possible so I will have enough time to read and consider it.

Sincerely,
Paolo

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Paolo E. Rosati
PhD in Asian and African Studies
Mobile/Whatsapp: (+39) 338 73 83 472
Skype: paoloe.rosati