Hello everyone,

With apologies for cross-posting, we hope this email finds you well. 

Máire and I are pleased to announce that we will be organizing the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network Symposium in October of this year at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, WI. For further correspondence and proposals, feel free to email us at mairepwhite@stanford.edu and kshitij.jain@balliol.ox.ac.uk. 

Please respond to us by February 15th with a tentative title and an abstract of 200-300 words. 

The details are as follows:

Symposium Title: Bhakta Bodies: Memory, Presence, and Veneration of Human Actors in South Asian Traditions

Description: The embodiment of divinities in South Asian traditions has received much scholarly attention (Holdrege 2015; 2016; Holdrege and Pechilis 2016; Waghorne et al. 1985). For instance, scholars have called for "devotion" to be replaced by "participation," emphasizing bhakti's call to engage in worship and the necessity of embodiment of the devout to fulfill that obligation (Pechilis 2000). Novetzke underlines that "the publics of bhakti in South Asia require 'embodiment,' the human as medium”(Novetzke 2007). For this symposium, we invite scholars to contribute papers that examine the conceptualization of embodiment, veneration, and presences of human actors or bhaktas in bhakti publics.

Such human presences that are venerated need not be confined to a living, flesh‑and‑blood human body. They may be embodied in multiple registers: as living practitioners, as deceased figures whose presence continues to be made real, or as non‑historical beings whose reality is affirmed through ritual and material practices. Such embodiment is made perceptible through the adornment, veneration, and circulation of their images, icons, literary invocations, hagiographies, material traces, and so forth. In this sense, the bhakta's presence is rendered real, tangible, and efficacious through the sensory and material practices of bhakti publics.

Through this symposium, we aim to explore the diverse ways in which the bodies of bhaktas are imagined, theorized, enacted, and brought into relation with other embodied presences across South Asian traditions. We particularly welcome studies that investigate the sites and modes of such embodiment through a wide range of sources, including material and visual culture, textual traditions, performative practices, and ethnographic accounts.

Best,

Kshitij and Máire