Place/No-place in Urban Asian Religiosity

This book focuses on Asia’s rapid pace of urbanization and devotes special attention to new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume—reaching from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain—focus particularly on the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. In the book, the definition of "spatial aspects" includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings—temples, halls and other meeting sites, but also includes less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new "mental spaces" urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, the book explores how distinct and blurred, open and bounded, communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how these religious organizations, class, gender and ongoing historical, political and economic transformations continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet “improvements,” metro rail lines, new national highways, wide internet access, that bulldoze—both literally and figuratively—religious places and force relocations and adjustments—often innovative and unexpected. A key interest for this volume, however, is in locating personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the varieties of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore, extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

Joanne Waghorne works in contemporary theoretical directions in the study of religion, especially issues of emerging religious/spiritual organizations, practices, and self understanding in the present era of mass communication, urbanization, and globalization. Spatial theory, cosmopolitanism, concepts of the public sphere, world systems, and visual studies inform her interdisciplinary approach which she works to integrate with her roots in History of Religions and phenomenology. Her concerns include revisioning World Religions/Comparative Religion in a post-colonial/post-modern era. Her publications contextualize these issues in contemporary urban India and in Singapore, and in the Hindu diaspora. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Indian Studies have supported her fieldwork in India. Recently she was a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellow and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Research Institute (Globalization and Religion cluster), National University of Singapore, researching gurus, devotees, and their international organizations from Singapore.