Neena Mahadev (Sri Lanka)

Multi-religion in Sri Lanka
Neena Mahadev

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Dr. Neena Mahadev (2013-2015)
CETREN Postdoctoral Researcher in the project “The Politics of Secularism and the Emergence of New Religiosities”
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen
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BA Sociology/Anthropology, concentration in South Asian Studies, Carleton College, USA
MA Social Sciences, University of Chicago, USA
MA and PhD, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Neena Mahadev’s expertise lies within the subfields of the anthropology of religion and political anthropology. She is also influenced by the fields of comparative religion and theology. Her ethnographic work accounts for inter-religious rivalry and conflict, but does so with an eye towards empirically examining the conditions of possibility for religious pluralism in contexts of where there is a prevalence of exclusionary identitarian attachments to religion. Her research probes the way that religious subjectivities and aspects of religious politics are shaped by the material and ideological entailments of theology (drawing on concepts of economic theology and political theology) particular to distinct religious traditions. Moreover, Neena’s work explores the religious newness that is engendered within a field of mutual religious influences; particularly, she examine how liturgy and soteriological aspirations shift under the influence of rival forms of religiosity, as well as under the constraints of a state that privileges particular religious forms.

The current book project builds upon her dissertation (2013) which is entitled, “Buddhist Nationalism, Christian Evangelism, and the Rearticulations of Conflict and Belonging in Postwar Sri Lanka.” Based on two years of field research in Sri Lanka, Neena examined expressions of religious conviction, identity politics of religion among Theravāda Buddhist and the Sri Lankan Christian (especially Roman Catholic and Pentecostal) communities. The work systematically examined the mutual skepticism that Buddhists and Christians expressed towards one another in the context of disputes over religious conversion, particularly from the mid-1990s until present. It also examines the politically expedient and the theologically orthodox lines along which alliances between Buddhists and certain denominational segments of Christianities were forged, especially under the revised demands of ethno-religious nationalism in Sri Lanka’s post-war era.

Neena’s new research project within CETREN will undertake a study of religious and ethnic “bridge-burning and boundary crossing,” in Sri Lanka and also Singapore, through an examination of itinerant religiosities within and between these different socio-political milieus. She plans to study the the trans-regional religious links between the two countries, especially in terms of the traffic of Buddhist, Christian and Hindu influences between South, Southeast and also East Asia.