C E Lorea
Biographic Data
| ID | 41218 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C E Lorea |
| GIVEN NAMES | C E |
| FAMILY NAME | Lorea |
| SIGNATURE | LOREA C E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tübingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3593-7023 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Tantric Futures: Entanglements with Power, Labor, and More‐Than‐Human Worlds
Informed by ethnographic fieldwork with humans, nonhumans, and the materiality of living traditions, this collection encourages comparative analysis, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-pollination among scholars of religion and Tantra across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayan region, and Europe. With its premodern origins in South Asia, Tantra has emerged as a repertoire of ritual and spiritual knowledge that has been adopted and a…
Pandemic Leftovers and Unfinished Covidian Times
A Sonic Vaccine for a White-Collar Disease
Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins…
Faith in Immunity and Structures of Trust
A Dalit religion online
Introduction—Asian Religions in the Covidian Age
Bacteria, viruses, ghosts, holy spirits.A number of invisible entities trespass and spill from nonhuman to human, betraying the precariousness and porousness of the boundaries separating them.The Covidian age has made us more aware of and yet also skeptical about such boundaries, as zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human, from human to human, and across international borders.Relations of "pandemicity" (Richardson 2020)-the social relationshi…
CoronAsur
More than two years since the start of this collaborative project on religion and COVID-19, for the first time all four editors of this book meet in person in Singapore in May 2022.We are immensely grateful that we can sit together in this phase of gradual reopening of some parts of the world and gradual closing of this book project.We would like to express our sincere thanks to all contributors to the CoronAsur blog, from which this volume resul…
Singing Tantra
From congregational singing to reenactments of the ḍamburu drumming of Shiva, tantric auditory practices reflect a complex religious acoustemology. Sounds and songs in a variety of vernaculars have represented an important component of lived religion in tantric communities. This is especially relevant when dealing with Bengali esoteric lineages. This chapter employs “tantric” as a “post-emic” category, to ensure that heterodox and esoteric Bengal…
Religion and the Covid-19 pandemic
This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spi…
Sonic matters
Songs are knowledge" (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the episte…
City of Mirrors
City of Mirrors: Songs of Lalan Sai, text, translation and commentary by Carol Salomon, edited by Keith E. Cantu and Saymon Zakaria. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxxiv + 611 pp., £117.50 (hb). ISBN 9780190680220
Contesting Multiple Borders
In the liquid borderlands between South and Southeast Asia, where refugees from East Bengal were resettled after the massive Partition-induced displacement, the god Ram is narrated as a great model of filial piety but also as the murderer of a low-caste ascetic. The Vaishnava saint Chaitanya is a divine character but also a reproachable renunciate who abandoned his mother and forced her to beg from door to door. The crocodile is an ideal devotee …
Religious returns, ritual changes and divinations on Covid‐19
Snake Charmers on Parade
Festivals have often been described as ritual occasions in which members of a community get together and overcome internal divisions and conflicts. The festival of Jhāṃpān (or Jhāpān Melā) provides a different definition of festivals as mirrors of social dramas and hierarchical divisions. The Ojhās of Bengal are low-class rural healers specializing in curing snakebites. The Bedes (or Bedias) are tribal snake catchers who extract venom and sell it…
I Am Afraid of Telling You This, Lest You'd Be Scared Shitless
As the verse chosen as a title for this article emblematically shows, esoteric movements have consistently used secrecy as a literary topos in their oral and written cultural expressions for a number of purposes. Scholars of South Asian religions, especially those in field of Tantric studies, have been scrutinizing for decades the need for secretive doctrines and a secret code-language (sandhyā bhāṣā), mostly interrogating textual sources and neg…
Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman
This book explores historical and cultural aspects of modern and contemporary Bengal through the performance-centred study of a particular repertoire: the songs of the saint-composer Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), who is particularly revered among Baul and Fakir singers. The author shows how songs, if examined as 'sacred scriptures', represent multi-dimensional texts for the study of South Asian religions. Revealing how previous studies about Bauls mir…
Interreligious Encounter and Proselytism in Pre-Mughal Bengal
The Jesuit father Nicolas Pimenta’s report mentions one of the first Christianmissions to Bengal (1598–1604). Based on fresh translations of the chapters in the report describing the Bengal mission, this article examines interreligious relations in contemporary Bengal characterised by the dialectic of coexistence and disjunction. Local kingship or lordship was the keystone in the structure of interreligious coexistence in Bengal. The Christian pr…
Bodies of Song
Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones
The Bauls of Bengal, a community of low-caste itinerant performers and esoteric practitioners, have received contrasting appreciations in the course of the last two centuries. Initially disregarded as the low tradition of an ‘immoral’, ‘degenerate’, ‘scatological’ sect, Baul songs were revived and promoted by the famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s publications on Bauls contributed to the diffusion of their success among intellectua…
Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body”
This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as…
Kristin Hanssen, Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia
Pregnant Males, Barren Mothers, and Religious Transvestism
Transcending Gender in the Songs and Practices of "Heterodox" Bengali
Religion and the Covid-19 pandemic
This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spi…
Sonic matters
Songs are knowledge" (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the episte…
I Am Afraid of Telling You This, Lest You'd Be Scared Shitless
As the verse chosen as a title for this article emblematically shows, esoteric movements have consistently used secrecy as a literary topos in their oral and written cultural expressions for a number of purposes. Scholars of South Asian religions, especially those in field of Tantric studies, have been scrutinizing for decades the need for secretive doctrines and a secret code-language (sandhyā bhāṣā), mostly interrogating textual sources and neg…
Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones
The Bauls of Bengal, a community of low-caste itinerant performers and esoteric practitioners, have received contrasting appreciations in the course of the last two centuries. Initially disregarded as the low tradition of an ‘immoral’, ‘degenerate’, ‘scatological’ sect, Baul songs were revived and promoted by the famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s publications on Bauls contributed to the diffusion of their success among intellectua…
Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body”
This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as…
A Dalit religion online
CoronAsur
More than two years since the start of this collaborative project on religion and COVID-19, for the first time all four editors of this book meet in person in Singapore in May 2022.We are immensely grateful that we can sit together in this phase of gradual reopening of some parts of the world and gradual closing of this book project.We would like to express our sincere thanks to all contributors to the CoronAsur blog, from which this volume resul…
Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body”
This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as…
Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones
The Bauls of Bengal, a community of low-caste itinerant performers and esoteric practitioners, have received contrasting appreciations in the course of the last two centuries. Initially disregarded as the low tradition of an ‘immoral’, ‘degenerate’, ‘scatological’ sect, Baul songs were revived and promoted by the famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s publications on Bauls contributed to the diffusion of their success among intellectua…
Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman
This book explores historical and cultural aspects of modern and contemporary Bengal through the performance-centred study of a particular repertoire: the songs of the saint-composer Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), who is particularly revered among Baul and Fakir singers. The author shows how songs, if examined as 'sacred scriptures', represent multi-dimensional texts for the study of South Asian religions. Revealing how previous studies about Bauls mir…
Interreligious Encounter and Proselytism in Pre-Mughal Bengal
The Jesuit father Nicolas Pimenta’s report mentions one of the first Christianmissions to Bengal (1598–1604). Based on fresh translations of the chapters in the report describing the Bengal mission, this article examines interreligious relations in contemporary Bengal characterised by the dialectic of coexistence and disjunction. Local kingship or lordship was the keystone in the structure of interreligious coexistence in Bengal. The Christian pr…
Bodies of Song
Snake Charmers on Parade
Festivals have often been described as ritual occasions in which members of a community get together and overcome internal divisions and conflicts. The festival of Jhāṃpān (or Jhāpān Melā) provides a different definition of festivals as mirrors of social dramas and hierarchical divisions. The Ojhās of Bengal are low-class rural healers specializing in curing snakebites. The Bedes (or Bedias) are tribal snake catchers who extract venom and sell it…
I Am Afraid of Telling You This, Lest You'd Be Scared Shitless
As the verse chosen as a title for this article emblematically shows, esoteric movements have consistently used secrecy as a literary topos in their oral and written cultural expressions for a number of purposes. Scholars of South Asian religions, especially those in field of Tantric studies, have been scrutinizing for decades the need for secretive doctrines and a secret code-language (sandhyā bhāṣā), mostly interrogating textual sources and neg…
Contesting Multiple Borders
In the liquid borderlands between South and Southeast Asia, where refugees from East Bengal were resettled after the massive Partition-induced displacement, the god Ram is narrated as a great model of filial piety but also as the murderer of a low-caste ascetic. The Vaishnava saint Chaitanya is a divine character but also a reproachable renunciate who abandoned his mother and forced her to beg from door to door. The crocodile is an ideal devotee …
Religious returns, ritual changes and divinations on Covid‐19
City of Mirrors
City of Mirrors: Songs of Lalan Sai, text, translation and commentary by Carol Salomon, edited by Keith E. Cantu and Saymon Zakaria. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxxiv + 611 pp., £117.50 (hb). ISBN 9780190680220
Singing Tantra
From congregational singing to reenactments of the ḍamburu drumming of Shiva, tantric auditory practices reflect a complex religious acoustemology. Sounds and songs in a variety of vernaculars have represented an important component of lived religion in tantric communities. This is especially relevant when dealing with Bengali esoteric lineages. This chapter employs “tantric” as a “post-emic” category, to ensure that heterodox and esoteric Bengal…
Religion and the Covid-19 pandemic
This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spi…
Sonic matters
Songs are knowledge" (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the episte…
Introduction—Asian Religions in the Covidian Age
Bacteria, viruses, ghosts, holy spirits.A number of invisible entities trespass and spill from nonhuman to human, betraying the precariousness and porousness of the boundaries separating them.The Covidian age has made us more aware of and yet also skeptical about such boundaries, as zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human, from human to human, and across international borders.Relations of "pandemicity" (Richardson 2020)-the social relationshi…
CoronAsur
More than two years since the start of this collaborative project on religion and COVID-19, for the first time all four editors of this book meet in person in Singapore in May 2022.We are immensely grateful that we can sit together in this phase of gradual reopening of some parts of the world and gradual closing of this book project.We would like to express our sincere thanks to all contributors to the CoronAsur blog, from which this volume resul…
A Sonic Vaccine for a White-Collar Disease
Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins…
Kristin Hanssen, Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia
Pregnant Males, Barren Mothers, and Religious Transvestism
Transcending Gender in the Songs and Practices of "Heterodox" Bengali
Faith in Immunity and Structures of Trust
A Dalit religion online
Tantric Futures: Entanglements with Power, Labor, and More‐Than‐Human Worlds
Informed by ethnographic fieldwork with humans, nonhumans, and the materiality of living traditions, this collection encourages comparative analysis, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-pollination among scholars of religion and Tantra across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayan region, and Europe. With its premodern origins in South Asia, Tantra has emerged as a repertoire of ritual and spiritual knowledge that has been adopted and a…
Pandemic Leftovers and Unfinished Covidian Times
Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Art (10 works) · History (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Bengali (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works)