This Seminar, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, interrogates how material forms of religious culture reveal the historically contingent nature of trans-local practices in the Indian Ocean World from 1300 to 1800. Such practices include the trade in Roman Catholic, Theravada Buddhist and Shiʿi Muslim relics; mosque, church and temple architecture; funerary structures; and transformations and translations of religious food taboos and ritual commensality practices.
The Indian Oceans Mellon Sawyer Seminar is a multidisciplinary project involving the collaboration of faculty and institutions from three Universities in North America including the University of Toronto, McGill University and Cornell University, in addition to South Asian specialists from across the globe. Our aim is to account for the dynamic intra- and inter-religious interactions that were fostered by material practices that textual study alone fails to account for. Our focus in object biographies and the examination of how religious experience is constituted through ritual and sensory engagements with the material world.