Rethinking Religion and Globalization: The Transnational Sathya Sai Movement

March 27, 2007

Tulasi Srinivas used the example of the little known but successful contemporary Hindu-Muslim Sathya Sai Movement to examine how public, urban religious practice, and spiritual devotion productively function in a global frame. Using visual material from her eight-year-long transcontinental study, she analyzed how religious objects, sacred space, and devotional memory in the Sai tradition sharpen questions of "tradition" and "modernity" and "self" and "other." Srinivas discussed her emergent theory of the dynamics of religion and globalization to focus on lessons for a productive interreligious dialogue.

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Rethinking Religion and Globalization: The Transnational Sathya Sai Movement

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About Tulasi Srinivas

Tulasi Srinivas is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Emerson College in Boston, where her research and writing focuses on the dynamics of globalization and culture, particularly as it relates to India and Hindu-Muslim syncretic religious traditions. In 1998-2000 she was the Director of the India Site for a ten-nation study of cultural globalization funded by the Pew Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation; the findings were published as an edited volume, Many Globalizations (2001). Her other publications include Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism Through the Sathya Sai Movement (2010) and Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012, as co-editor). Srinivas is an advisor to the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs during 2006-2007. Srinivas received her Ph.D. from Boston University.

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