About this Event
This talk draws from ongoing research for a new project that examines religious mobilities between South India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. Using the enduring legacy of a 16th century Sufi saint—Shahul Hamid of Nagore—as the starting point, this talk explores Nagore’s expansive sacred geography across the Indian Ocean World. Sufi sacred geographies are moored to shrines on land but deeply informed by histories of travel, mobility, and circulation. In this talk, I ethnographically trace the ruptures and continuities in producing, sustaining, and sometimes dismantling the sacred in these various sites by different actors. The specific racialized contexts and moral geographies, therefore, connect and differentiate each of the sites where Shahul Hamid is venerated. As an anthropologist of religion, I bring a ‘lived religion’ framework that prioritizes the social and ritual life in and around his shrines. This includes questions that community members in each place are grappling with in the present regarding the validity and relevance of rituals, the practices of devotees that are scrutinized by state authorities and religious bodies, and the aesthetic and spatial changes to the shrine buildings.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elm City Club, 155 Elm Street, New Haven, United States
USD 0.00
