Wir möchten Sie auf die Veröffentlichung des Bandes Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives  aufmerksam machen, der von Malini Ambach, Jonas Buchholz, beide Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Forschungsstelle Hindu Temple Legends, und Ute Hüsken, Leiterin der Abteilung Kultur- und Religionsgeschichte Südasiens am SAI, herausgegeben wurde. Der Band ist kürzlich (2022) in Open Access bei Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing erschienen und PDFs des gesamten Buches oder einzelner Kapitel können unter https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.906 heruntergeladen werden. Um über den Band zu sprechen, waren Jonas Buchholz und Ute Hüsken zu Gast im New Book in Indian Religions Podcast. Die Folge kann nachgehört werden unter https://newbooksnetwork.com/malini-ambach-et-al-temples-texts-and-networks-south-indian-perspectives-hasp-2022 auf allen Podcast-Plattformen nachgehört werden.

Zum Inhalt des Bandes (englisch):

For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but stand in multiple re­lationships to other temples and sacred sites. They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist within a shared sacred space. The current volume pays close attention to the con­nections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it within a particular place or on a trans-local level. These connections are described as "temple networks," a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes.