SAI - News

New publication by Ute Hüsken

Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken, Chair of the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia contributed a chapter entitled “Gods and Goddesses in the Ritual Landscape of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Kāncipuram” to the new publication Layered Landscapes: Early Modern Religious Space Across Faiths and Culture, edited by Eric Nelson and Jonathan Wright (Routledge). The volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. The chapter by Hüsken deals with the construction of sacred space in the Hindu context of the sacred city of Kāncipuram. By looking at the different sectarian interpretations of different ritual actions in oral narratives and in mythological texts, she demonstrates how mythology and history are performatively remembered and how different dormant layers of sacred space are ‘activated’ during the ritual use of this space. She argues, among other points, that “sacredness is not a quality of a specific place, but that it is attributed to space through action performed within or relating to this space.”

11 Oct 2017

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