array(2) { [0]=> string(4) "toto" [1]=> string(4) "titi"} 2019-2025 | DHARMA - The Domestication of “Hindu” Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia

Recherche | Projets et programmes financés

2019-2025 | DHARMA - The Domestication of “Hindu” Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia

Funding

ERC (Synergy 2018)

Coordinator

Emmanuel FRANCIS (CRCN, CNRS, CEIAS, UMR 8564, EHESS & CNRS)

Partners

École française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris (Arlo GRIFFITHS)

Humboldt-Universität, Berlin (Annette SCHMIEDCHEN)

Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale (Florinda DE SIMINI)

 

The religion known today as “Hinduism” is a major world religion and the main religion of the world’s largest democracy, India. But the history of “Hindu” institutions is not limited to India. DHARMA will study the history of “Hinduism” in comparative perspective, focusing on the period from the 6th to the 13th century. During this period, the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway for intense cultural exchange. The resulting process of “Indianisation”, marked notably by the spread of “Hinduism”, of an Indian writing system and of India’s sacred language Sanskrit, impacted large parts of South and Southeast Asia.

The Sanskrit word DHARMA can designate the cosmic law that is upheld both by gods and humans. But it is also often used to refer to any of the numerous temple-related foundations made to support this law. The DHARMA project seeks to understand the process of “institutionalisation” of “Hinduism” by investigating the roles of various agents, from kings and noblemen to priests, monks and local communities. It emphasizes social and material contexts of “Hinduism”, which requires a multi-regional, multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary methodology, to forge a real synergy of scholarship on premodern South and Southeast Asia.

The approach will be based on the correlation and contextualisation of written evidence from inscriptions and manuscripts and material evidence from temples and other kinds of archaeological sites. The project will be carried out in four task-forces. Three regional task forces will focus, respectively, on the inscriptions and archaeological sites of the Tamil-speaking South of India (A), of Central through North-eastern South Asia into what is today Myanmar (B), and of mainland plus insular Southeast Asia (C). A fourth, transversal task-force (D), will focus on textual material transmitted in manuscript form.

Inscriptions are the main sources for the history of premodern South and Southeast Asia. But they are not all accessible, even less so in a machine-processable format. For the large-scale comparative research undertaken, making as much as possible of South and Southeast Asian epigraphy available, in a digital database, is therefore a core objective of the project. South and Southeast Asian manuscripts, normally written on palm-leaf, preserve a rich textual archive relevant to the history of “Hinduism”. Editions with translations of texts that have so far remained unpublished, and therefore untapped, by historical research, will be produced. These texts include descriptions of religious practices, as well as prescriptionsthat deal both with lay religiosity and with religious life in temples and monasteries. As for archaeological evidence, surveys and excavations at sites which are known to be rich in data and will be conducted enabling to confront the findings in the inscriptions and texts with the archaeological record.

 

Keywords

epigraphy, philology, archaeology, digital humanities

https://dharma.hypotheses.org/

EHESS
CNRS

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