Dunbar Moodie
Biographic Data
| ID | 244049 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dunbar Moodie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dunbar |
| FAMILY NAME | Moodie |
| SIGNATURE | MOODIE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oklahoma |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8797-9439 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Making Management Hindu
Hindu Economicus
Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether (review)
Reviewed by: Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether Deonnie Moodie Lucia Hulsether, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) Capitalist Humanitarianism should come with a trigger warning. Lucia Hulsether began writing it ten days after her brother, who had worked in a call center, died by suicide. She frames this book around what she refers to as his "death by capitalism"— a death that is no outlier, she argues,…
Retail Religion
A new discourse that both indigenizes and sacralizes mass consumption and corporate labor has emerged alongside the opening of India’s economy at the turn of the twenty-first century. To illustrate this argument, I take as my case study the so-named “retail religion” that leaders within India’s retail giant, Future Group, produced in the early 2000s to make buying more and working harder quintessentially Indian and specifically Hindu traits. Wher…
Corporate Hinduism
This article takes stock of existing scholarly literature on corporate Hinduism and charts a course for future studies of the same. So far, this literature has focused on business gurus who deploy Hindu texts and ideas in order to justify, organize, and lend meaning to business practices centered around knowledge work in the corporate sector both in India and globally. I argue that further scholarship should pay closer attention to the sites and …
Business and Benevolence
Kālīghāṭ and the Fashioning of Middle-Class Modernities
B-School Religion
In the industrial sector of Kolkata’s Salt Lake township, the spires, shikaras and domes of religious sites that are interspersed throughout the city proper are absent, and high-rise glass and metal buildings housing multinational corporations, hotels and shopping malls take their place. But religion is not absent there. Instead, management professors and business leaders transform those buildings into temples by framing the labour that takes pla…
On Blood, Power, and Public Interest
Critiques of animal sacrifice in India have become increasingly strident over the past fifteen years. In the state of West Bengal, many of these critiques center on Kālīghāṭ, a landmark Hindu pilgrimage site in Kolkata where goats are sacrificed daily to the goddess Kālī. However, while similar critiques of this practice have resulted in many Indian states pushing to ban it—or enforce previous bans of it—no such legal action has been issued in We…
A Religious Institution Goes Public
In the mid-twentieth century, Kālīghāṭ became a site that middle-class actors could not only write about but also act upon in an official capacity. Because Kālīghāṭ was never royally patronized, East India Company and British official bodies did not take over the role of departing royal powers there as they did at other temples across India. Instead, middle-class actors took it upon themselves to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s management system in the mid-…
Resisting Middle-Class Modernizing Projects
Middle-class modernizers frame their projects at Kālīghāṭ as being in the best interests of the Hindu public in Kolkata. However, so many who frequently worship at the temple or who live and work on temple grounds do not share the desire to transform the temple so that it represents Indian modernity. Lower-class men and women are successful in resisting modernizing projects because they employ tactics that make state control difficult or impossib…
Reviving and Reforming Calcutta’s Hindu Past
In their English- and Bengali-language journal articles and books, middle-class Bengali Hindu authors at the turn of the twentieth century lifted Kālīghāṭ out of the realm of mythology and superstition and embedded it in the realm of linear history and rationality. They further wrote Kālīghāṭ’s ritual practices into a monolithic, non-violent form of Hinduism using rhetoric that was deeply ensconced in the then-emerging language of Hindu reformers…
The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City
This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kol…
Asbestos Blues
Social existence and the practice of personal integrity
Books reviewed
J. H. P. Serfontein, Brotherhood of Power: An Expose of the Secret Afrikaner Broederbond (London, Rex Collings, 1978) Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, The Super Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1978) Mozambique: Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1st and 2nd December, 1978 (Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1979. p…
The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City
This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kol…
Social existence and the practice of personal integrity
Hindu Economicus
Corporate Hinduism
This article takes stock of existing scholarly literature on corporate Hinduism and charts a course for future studies of the same. So far, this literature has focused on business gurus who deploy Hindu texts and ideas in order to justify, organize, and lend meaning to business practices centered around knowledge work in the corporate sector both in India and globally. I argue that further scholarship should pay closer attention to the sites and …
Business and Benevolence
Kālīghāṭ and the Fashioning of Middle-Class Modernities
Books reviewed
J. H. P. Serfontein, Brotherhood of Power: An Expose of the Secret Afrikaner Broederbond (London, Rex Collings, 1978) Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, The Super Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond (Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1978) Mozambique: Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1st and 2nd December, 1978 (Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1979. p…
Social existence and the practice of personal integrity
Asbestos Blues
A Religious Institution Goes Public
In the mid-twentieth century, Kālīghāṭ became a site that middle-class actors could not only write about but also act upon in an official capacity. Because Kālīghāṭ was never royally patronized, East India Company and British official bodies did not take over the role of departing royal powers there as they did at other temples across India. Instead, middle-class actors took it upon themselves to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s management system in the mid-…
Resisting Middle-Class Modernizing Projects
Middle-class modernizers frame their projects at Kālīghāṭ as being in the best interests of the Hindu public in Kolkata. However, so many who frequently worship at the temple or who live and work on temple grounds do not share the desire to transform the temple so that it represents Indian modernity. Lower-class men and women are successful in resisting modernizing projects because they employ tactics that make state control difficult or impossib…
Reviving and Reforming Calcutta’s Hindu Past
In their English- and Bengali-language journal articles and books, middle-class Bengali Hindu authors at the turn of the twentieth century lifted Kālīghāṭ out of the realm of mythology and superstition and embedded it in the realm of linear history and rationality. They further wrote Kālīghāṭ’s ritual practices into a monolithic, non-violent form of Hinduism using rhetoric that was deeply ensconced in the then-emerging language of Hindu reformers…
The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City
This book is about what temples do for Hindus in the modern era, particularly those who belong to India’s diverse and evolving middle classes. While many excoriate these sites as emblematic of all that is backward about Hinduism and India, many others work to modernize them so that they might become emblems of a proud heritage and of the nation’s future. I take Kālīghāṭ Temple, a powerful pilgrimage site dedicated to the dark goddess Kālī, in Kol…
Kālīghāṭ and the Fashioning of Middle-Class Modernities
B-School Religion
In the industrial sector of Kolkata’s Salt Lake township, the spires, shikaras and domes of religious sites that are interspersed throughout the city proper are absent, and high-rise glass and metal buildings housing multinational corporations, hotels and shopping malls take their place. But religion is not absent there. Instead, management professors and business leaders transform those buildings into temples by framing the labour that takes pla…
On Blood, Power, and Public Interest
Critiques of animal sacrifice in India have become increasingly strident over the past fifteen years. In the state of West Bengal, many of these critiques center on Kālīghāṭ, a landmark Hindu pilgrimage site in Kolkata where goats are sacrificed daily to the goddess Kālī. However, while similar critiques of this practice have resulted in many Indian states pushing to ban it—or enforce previous bans of it—no such legal action has been issued in We…
Business and Benevolence
Retail Religion
A new discourse that both indigenizes and sacralizes mass consumption and corporate labor has emerged alongside the opening of India’s economy at the turn of the twenty-first century. To illustrate this argument, I take as my case study the so-named “retail religion” that leaders within India’s retail giant, Future Group, produced in the early 2000s to make buying more and working harder quintessentially Indian and specifically Hindu traits. Wher…
Corporate Hinduism
This article takes stock of existing scholarly literature on corporate Hinduism and charts a course for future studies of the same. So far, this literature has focused on business gurus who deploy Hindu texts and ideas in order to justify, organize, and lend meaning to business practices centered around knowledge work in the corporate sector both in India and globally. I argue that further scholarship should pay closer attention to the sites and …
Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether (review)
Reviewed by: Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether Deonnie Moodie Lucia Hulsether, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) Capitalist Humanitarianism should come with a trigger warning. Lucia Hulsether began writing it ten days after her brother, who had worked in a call center, died by suicide. She frames this book around what she refers to as his "death by capitalism"— a death that is no outlier, she argues,…
Making Management Hindu
Hindu Economicus
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Hinduism (9 works) · Religious studies (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works)