Books by Amy Allocco
Dr. Amy Allocco's current research project is titled Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Insta... more Dr. Amy Allocco's current research project is titled Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Installation Rituals in Tamil South India. Her ethnography investigates the ongoing ritual relationships that Hindus maintain with their dead kin and focuses on ceremonies to honor deceased relatives called puvataikkari (“the woman wearing flowers”), including both those performed annually to seek generalized blessings and occasional, elaborate invitation rituals in which ritual drummers summon the spirit, convince it to possess a human host, and beg it to “come home” as a protective family deity. She locates these ceremonies within the broader repertoire of rituals that Tamil Hindus, both Brahmin and non-Brahmin, perform for dead kin as well as those intended to honor their family deities (kulateyvam).
With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical, she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Domesticating the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities. Details of two relevant publications, including her 2021 cover article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, are listed below.
Relevant Publications
· “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)
· “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)
SUNY Press, 2018
This volume offers 13 case studies drawn from both historic and contemporary religions of South A... more This volume offers 13 case studies drawn from both historic and contemporary religions of South Asia to analyze and theorize deliberate changes to ritual structure or performance. While rituals derive much of their authority from their association with tradition and must adhere to varying degrees to certain prescriptions, they are also routinely the subjects of intentional, conscious, and even public invention or alteration. We refer to these interventions in ritual as “innovation” to signal that we see these changes not as devious or cynical but rather as part of ritual’s inherent creative potential and its adaptability to new contexts and circumstances. Innovation is simply one of set of options that ritual presents to participants and performers for pursuing the objectives of specific interested parties. Ritual innovation can legitimate or express social status, invest new forms of political or religious authority with legitimacy, or authenticate non-traditional modes of religious selfhood.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Introduction.”
PART I: RITUAL INNOVATION AND POLITICAL POWER
Chapter 2: Nawaraj Chaulagain (Illinois Wesleyan University), “Coronation of the Hindu King: Tradition and Innovation in Nepalese History.”
Chapter 3: Anne T. Mocko (Concordia College), “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy: Notes on Nepal’s Bhoṭo Jātrā, 2006-2008.”
Chapter 4: Michael Baltutis (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Innovating the Ancient, Instantiating the Urban: the South Asian Indra Festival.”
Chapter 5: Luke Whitmore (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “Changes in Ritual Practice at the Himalayan Hindu Shrine of Kedārnāth.”
Chapter 6: Reid B. Locklin (University of Toronto), “Ritual Renunciation and/or Ritual Innovation? Re-describing Advaita Tradition.”
PART II: RITUAL AND THE ECONOMIES OF CASTE AND CLASS
Chapter 7: Matthew R. Sayers (Lebanon Valley College), “Ancestral Rites Re-worked: The Transition from Solemn to Domestic Modes of Feeding the Dead.”
Chapter 8: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu.”
Chapter 9: Shital Sharma (McGill University), “Consuming Kṛṣṇa: Women, Class, and Ritual Economies in Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism.”
PART III: RITUAL AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER
Chapter 10: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University), “Village Widow/Town Priestess:
Innovating Ritual Power in a Pilgrimage Economy.”
Chapter 11: M. Whitney Kelting (Northeastern University), “Leveraging Agency: Young Jain Women’s Ritual Innovations through the Updhān Fast.”
Chapter 12: Liz Wilson (Miami University of Ohio), “Ritual Innovation and Masculine Identity Formation in the Contemporary Cult of Lord Ayyappaṉ.”
PART IV: RITUAL INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 13: Charles S. Preston (University of Chicago), “Dancing the Vedas, Deritualizing Theory: A Study of ‘The Universal Truth’”
Chapter 14: Janet Gunn (Thorneloe College at Laurentian University), “Ganesha and the Chocolate Almonds: Ritual Innovation and Efficacy in Diaspora.”
Chapter 15: Sudharshan Durayappah (University of Toronto) and Corinne Dempsey (Nazareth College), “Recasting Sexuality, Gender, and Family through Contemporary Canadian Ritual Innovation.”
Journal Articles by Amy Allocco
Fieldwork in Religion, 2020
Amy L. Allocco is an ethnographer whose research focuses on vernacular Hinduism, espe-ci... more Amy L. Allocco is an ethnographer whose research focuses on vernacular Hinduism, espe-cially contemporary ritual traditions and wom-en’s religious practices in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where she has been study-ing and conducting fieldwork for 25 years. She has published on snake goddess traditions, the narrative strategies of a female Hindu healer, and ritual innovation. Allocco’s current project, “Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Instal-lation Rituals in Tamil South India”, delineates the repertoire of ritual relationships that Hindus maintain with their dead kin and analyzes the ceremonies to honor deceased relatives called pūvāt ̇aikkāri (“the woman wearing flowers”).
Jennifer D. Ortegren is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose work focuses on the intersections of religion and class among upwardly mobile women, and their families, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. She has published on the everyday and ritual lives of emerging middle-class Hindu women and is currently developing a project among Muslim women, including how class mobility impacts relationships between neighbors from diverse religious backgrounds and the role of women in mediating these relationships.
Fieldwork in Religion, 2020
This article focuses on the intergenerational gifts and relationships that have structured my exp... more This article focuses on the intergenerational gifts and relationships that have structured my experience of the flows between home and the field in order to highlight the deeply intersubjective and relational aspects of fieldwork. It considers the shifting technologies of reflection—the diverse forms of field-writing that I produced at different stages as intertextual mediations of my fieldworlds—present in an archive chronicling twenty-five years of study and fieldwork in South India. Excavating this archive—which includes traditional fieldnotes, handwritten letters, creative essays, emails, voice memos and visual fieldnotes—has sharpened my awareness of the value of analyzing fieldwork experiences longitudinally and offers rich glimpses of everyday religion and gendered social relations. These materials underscore the interpenetrations of home and field, life and death, and self and other and prompt me to reaffirm my commitment to centering the crucial relationships that develop in these contexts in my scholarship, teaching and mentoring.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this artic... more Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this article presents one Hindu invitation ritual to return dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri to the world of the living and install them as household deities. This two-day ceremony demonstrates that prevailing scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions have constrained our ability to appreciate other models for ritual relationships between the living and the dead. These vernacular rituals call the dead back into the world, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine so they may protect and sustain living kin. Rather than aiming to irrevocably separate the dead from the living, these rites are instead oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead and therefore reveal a fundamentally different picture than that articulated in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts.
Journal of Hindu Studies , 2020
This article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession pe... more This article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession performances from age thirteen, resisted marriage through her twenties, and committed suicide at twenty-nine. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Aaru and her family conducted between 2006 and 2019, it analyses narratives concerning her untimely death, subsequent 1 E 6 D deification, and eventual domestication as a pūvā aikkāri. It highlights the hermeneutical challenges associated with three intersecting spheres: the dominant categories that shape the scholarly understanding of Hinduism; vernacular Hinduism as revealed in Aaru's complex story; and the ethnographic research and writing process. I resist an arbitrary resolution of the gaps and seeming inconsistencies that abound in these accounts, arguing instead that we can enlarge and nuance our understandings of matters as diverse as ritual relationships with the dead, the nature of Tamil family deities, and the gendered tensions of the contemporary moment if we hold space for multiple interpretive possibilities. Indeed, Aaru's case offers us significant resources for a fuller, more inclusive appreciation of the textures of vernacular Hinduism-Hinduism as it is experienced, lived, and practiced in particular places and contexts-and compels us to consider the limitations of prevailing interpretive paradigms and the fragmental and shifting nature of ethnographic knowledge.
This essay argues that through narrative performance, Valliyammal, a female Hindu healer from Sou... more This essay argues that through narrative performance, Valliyammal, a female Hindu healer from South India, earns respect (matippu or mariyatai), creates and maintains her ritual authority in both her domestic shrine and in public temple spaces, and legitimates her unusual religious leadership role. 1 Valliyammal's life stories constitute one discursive strategy to establish her identity as a now-single woman whose "call" to serve the Goddess demanded choosing the deity over her husband and thus entailed celibacy, which in turn has intensified her power (cakti) and facilitated her ritual knowledge. As a professional ritual healer, Valliyammal inhabits what has traditionally been a male role, and from this vantage point, she negotiates normative gender expectations, extends gender boundaries, and ultimately embodies something of an alternative gender ideology. Importantly, in addition to authorizing new models of selfhood, Valliyammal's narratives and ritual performances also produce the conditions for her economic independence and, thus, her sustenance.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South India, this article traces out the connectio... more Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South India, this article traces out the connections that devotees, astrologers, priests, and other Hindu ritual specialists make between nāga dōṣam ("snake blemish," a negative astrological condition) and the Kali Yuga, the fourth and most degenerate world age according to Hindu cosmology. These parallel discourses are intimately related to the changes in religious observance, values, and social roles that informants describe as associated with "modern times" (by which they mean the present and the quite recent past), and demonstrate the ways in which individuals are using the indigenous frameworks of nāga dōṣam and the Kali Yuga in order to confront and respond to challenging contemporary realities. Three elements that informants foregrounded in their narratives -namely declining religious practice, shifting gender expectations, and ecological destruction -are explored in some depth. Perceived changes in degrees of ritual observance and in women's roles as well as changing relationships with the natural world in urbanizing, globalizing India are understood both as partially responsible for the recent rise in nāga dōṣam and as uniquely characteristic of the Kali Yuga, suggesting that these cosmological and astrological models work in tandem as indigenous idioms for categorizing and accounting for the anxiety-producing situations and disconcerting realities that increasingly confront people in these modern times.
In contemporary South Indian Hinduism, nāgas are ambivalently imaged: they are divine beings with... more In contemporary South Indian Hinduism, nāgas are ambivalently imaged: they are divine beings with the capacity to bless as well as to curse. In addition to their primary association with fertility, these divinized non-human animals are perceived as particularly receptive to women's concerns (healing and familial prosperity) and are widely worshipped to obtain these blessings. The ritual propitiation of snake deities is overwhelmingly the practice of women in Tamil Nadu today, where nāga deities take multiple manifestations, including that of divine snakes who live in anthills and anthropomorphic goddesses who are installed in temples. yet nāgas who are disturbed or harmed may cause a malefic astrological condition called nāga dōṣam (snake blemish). This astrological flaw, which manifests in inauspicious planetary configurations in an individual's horoscope, is faulted for late marriage and infertility as well as an array of additional negative effects. Drawing on many years of ethnographic fieldwork and textual study in Tamil Nadu, this article describes and analyses myths and narratives that reveal the dual character of nāgas as divine beings capable of dispensing blessings, as well as blocking marriage and withholding much-desired offspring. The article also analyses the critical dimension of gender in nāgas' narratives, where human males often beat or kill their household's reptilian visitor, while females respond with offerings and reverence.
Th is essay describes the challenges to ethnographic writing that are raised by multiplicity, con... more Th is essay describes the challenges to ethnographic writing that are raised by multiplicity, contradiction, and confl icting narratives in the fi eldwork process. Specifi cally, the essay examines multiple and sometimes opposing articulations of the causes for, and ritual treatments of, a malignant horoscopic condition called nāga dōṣ am (snake blemish) in contemporary South India. Th is examination raises questions about the relationships between textual knowledge and ritual performance, as well as the nature of competing claims to ritual and textual authority. At the heart of these interpretive questions lies the issue of representation, or how best to characterize such multiplicity and inconsistency in the ethnographic texts which grow from our fi eld research. Drawing on excerpts from fi eldwork interviews with two Brahmin religious specialists, this essay considers how best to evoke the realities of the Tamil ritual fi eld without simply inscribing these power dynamics on the ethnographic text.
Book Chapters by Amy Allocco
Women and Religion, Philosophy and Feminism: The Colgate Heritage in Honor of Professors Marilyn Thie and Wanda Warren Berry, 2019
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard f... more The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.oo'"
Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion, 2018
No part of chis book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permissio... more No part of chis book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise wirhout the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Edited Journal Issues by Amy Allocco
Fieldwork in Religion, 2020
PURM (https://blogs.elon.edu/purm) , 2018
In This Issue:
In a research article that contextualizes many of the benefits and challenges of c... more In This Issue:
In a research article that contextualizes many of the benefits and challenges of conducting UR in global contexts, authors Vandermaas-Peeler, Allocco, and Fair develop a set of recommendations based on focus groups with students and offer a case study of effective instrumental and psychosocial mentoring practices utilized by mentors in a multidisciplinary research group. In the second paper, Allocco and Fredsell offer an elaborated account of highly engaged mentoring in a joint ethnographic research project in India that transformed not only the research but also the authors’ relationship and identities as scholars and feminists.
Intensive faculty-mentored UR is often conducted during the summer months. Heldt, Smith, Cunningham, and Miller discuss a collaborative model that facilitated students’ work in interdisciplinary and international research teams addressing global health research initiatives, as well as their knowledge and experience in communicating findings with peers and the public as they conducted mentored UR in Denmark.
Kuh (2008) argued that students should participate in at least two high-impact practices (HIPs) to augment opportunities for deep, engaged, and sustained learning. As the authors in the next set of papers demonstrate, the integration of UR and study away programs maximizes this potential. Campbell and Jones describe the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing a research-centered, short-term study abroad program in South Africa. Utilizing their expertise in the fields of history and psychology, the faculty directors scaffold students’ development and conduct of research projects and elucidate students’ perspectives by incorporating their voices into the paper. Bradley and Teitsort share benefits of combining UR and study abroad in course-integrated linguistic fieldwork research, particularly highlighting the advantages for the fields of social science and language science. Hall, Walkington, Vandermaas-Peeler, Shanahan, Gudiksen, and Zimmer offer a framework of salient mentoring practices and demonstrate how it can be used to support an emergent curriculum design project that embeds UR within a study abroad program in Scandinavia. Oppenheim and Knott explore the pedagogical dimensions of digital mentorship within a program that integrates UR and internships in grassroots social impact organizations. In exploring the combination of immersive global service-learning with internship experiences, this research team highlights student inquiry that is grounded in reflexivity, committed to polyvocality, and seeks to raise a certain kind of critical awareness.
As the impact of study away experiences on the home campus is virtually uncharted in extant scholarship on mentoring UR, the contribution of authors Duan, Little, Williams, Wagner, and Moritz is especially significant. Their paper describes a collaborative student research project spanning three contexts, two countries and two disciplines. In this unique model, students in a short-term study abroad course in China purchased one artistic object based on pre-departure research that later became part of the Elon University permanent art collection. In the following semester, another group of students in an on-campus course researched the historical meaning and cultural significance of the objects. The project culminated in an on-campus art exhibit showcasing the students’ research, illustrating how a collaborative student research project can serve as an engaging tool to bring short-term study abroad back to campus and mentor cross-disciplinary UR. In the issue’s final paper, authors Krumm, Perkowski, Mecouch, Woods, Shea, Goraya and Tran share an innovative on-campus course design in which students partnered with faculty and museum curators on research projects using digitized natural history collections. This collaboration provided students with opportunities to expand their understanding of global biological issues and experience different research communities.
Future Directions
Our work as co-editors of this special issue offers a unique opportunity to identify promising trajectories for future scholarship on mentoring UR in global contexts. The dialogues among faculty mentors, students, institutional and community partners, and many others, highlight the collaborative, innovative nature of mentoring within and across contexts and the importance of sustained, engaged professional networks to support these interactions longitudinally. The diverse contexts in which our colleagues are working to support student learning and engagement offer fertile opportunities for ongoing scholarship. Future research could analyze case studies that leverage innovative mentoring pedagogies and practices, synthesize salient mentoring practices across contexts, and identify shared challenges and recommended solutions from the perspectives of faculty mentors, students and community partners. The impact of students’ participation in faculty-mentored UR in diverse contexts on the participating institutions, including the home campus and off-campus partners, is an under-studied topic of the utmost importance for higher education. Scholarship examining the integration of two high-impact practices, undergraduate research and diversity/global learning, is essential for the development of evidence-based pedagogies, practices, and programs that support the highest quality teaching and learning. This is an emergent field of scholarship with immense potential and we anticipate future issues of PURM that elucidate the essential role of faculty mentors.
In closing, we would like to acknowledge the insightful, constructive, and expedient feedback that the reviewers offered the authors of this special issue. We also want to thank the Editor-in-Chief of PURM, Dr. Qian Xu, who works diligently to support the authors and editors behind the scenes. By sharing their wisdom and expertise, these scholars augmented the quality of each contribution and the special issue as a whole. We appreciate their contributions and offer them our sincere gratitude for their efforts on behalf of PURM.
Sincerely,
Amy L. Allocco, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Multifaith Scholars, Elon University
Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Director, Center for Research on Global Engagement, Elon University
Reference
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. AAC&U: Washington, D.C.
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Books by Amy Allocco
With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical, she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Domesticating the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities. Details of two relevant publications, including her 2021 cover article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, are listed below.
Relevant Publications
· “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)
· “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Introduction.”
PART I: RITUAL INNOVATION AND POLITICAL POWER
Chapter 2: Nawaraj Chaulagain (Illinois Wesleyan University), “Coronation of the Hindu King: Tradition and Innovation in Nepalese History.”
Chapter 3: Anne T. Mocko (Concordia College), “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy: Notes on Nepal’s Bhoṭo Jātrā, 2006-2008.”
Chapter 4: Michael Baltutis (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Innovating the Ancient, Instantiating the Urban: the South Asian Indra Festival.”
Chapter 5: Luke Whitmore (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “Changes in Ritual Practice at the Himalayan Hindu Shrine of Kedārnāth.”
Chapter 6: Reid B. Locklin (University of Toronto), “Ritual Renunciation and/or Ritual Innovation? Re-describing Advaita Tradition.”
PART II: RITUAL AND THE ECONOMIES OF CASTE AND CLASS
Chapter 7: Matthew R. Sayers (Lebanon Valley College), “Ancestral Rites Re-worked: The Transition from Solemn to Domestic Modes of Feeding the Dead.”
Chapter 8: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu.”
Chapter 9: Shital Sharma (McGill University), “Consuming Kṛṣṇa: Women, Class, and Ritual Economies in Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism.”
PART III: RITUAL AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER
Chapter 10: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University), “Village Widow/Town Priestess:
Innovating Ritual Power in a Pilgrimage Economy.”
Chapter 11: M. Whitney Kelting (Northeastern University), “Leveraging Agency: Young Jain Women’s Ritual Innovations through the Updhān Fast.”
Chapter 12: Liz Wilson (Miami University of Ohio), “Ritual Innovation and Masculine Identity Formation in the Contemporary Cult of Lord Ayyappaṉ.”
PART IV: RITUAL INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 13: Charles S. Preston (University of Chicago), “Dancing the Vedas, Deritualizing Theory: A Study of ‘The Universal Truth’”
Chapter 14: Janet Gunn (Thorneloe College at Laurentian University), “Ganesha and the Chocolate Almonds: Ritual Innovation and Efficacy in Diaspora.”
Chapter 15: Sudharshan Durayappah (University of Toronto) and Corinne Dempsey (Nazareth College), “Recasting Sexuality, Gender, and Family through Contemporary Canadian Ritual Innovation.”
Journal Articles by Amy Allocco
Jennifer D. Ortegren is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose work focuses on the intersections of religion and class among upwardly mobile women, and their families, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. She has published on the everyday and ritual lives of emerging middle-class Hindu women and is currently developing a project among Muslim women, including how class mobility impacts relationships between neighbors from diverse religious backgrounds and the role of women in mediating these relationships.
Book Chapters by Amy Allocco
Edited Journal Issues by Amy Allocco
Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India
Guest Editors: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University) and Jennifer D. Ortegren (Middlebury College)
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/FIR/issue/view/1748
In a research article that contextualizes many of the benefits and challenges of conducting UR in global contexts, authors Vandermaas-Peeler, Allocco, and Fair develop a set of recommendations based on focus groups with students and offer a case study of effective instrumental and psychosocial mentoring practices utilized by mentors in a multidisciplinary research group. In the second paper, Allocco and Fredsell offer an elaborated account of highly engaged mentoring in a joint ethnographic research project in India that transformed not only the research but also the authors’ relationship and identities as scholars and feminists.
Intensive faculty-mentored UR is often conducted during the summer months. Heldt, Smith, Cunningham, and Miller discuss a collaborative model that facilitated students’ work in interdisciplinary and international research teams addressing global health research initiatives, as well as their knowledge and experience in communicating findings with peers and the public as they conducted mentored UR in Denmark.
Kuh (2008) argued that students should participate in at least two high-impact practices (HIPs) to augment opportunities for deep, engaged, and sustained learning. As the authors in the next set of papers demonstrate, the integration of UR and study away programs maximizes this potential. Campbell and Jones describe the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing a research-centered, short-term study abroad program in South Africa. Utilizing their expertise in the fields of history and psychology, the faculty directors scaffold students’ development and conduct of research projects and elucidate students’ perspectives by incorporating their voices into the paper. Bradley and Teitsort share benefits of combining UR and study abroad in course-integrated linguistic fieldwork research, particularly highlighting the advantages for the fields of social science and language science. Hall, Walkington, Vandermaas-Peeler, Shanahan, Gudiksen, and Zimmer offer a framework of salient mentoring practices and demonstrate how it can be used to support an emergent curriculum design project that embeds UR within a study abroad program in Scandinavia. Oppenheim and Knott explore the pedagogical dimensions of digital mentorship within a program that integrates UR and internships in grassroots social impact organizations. In exploring the combination of immersive global service-learning with internship experiences, this research team highlights student inquiry that is grounded in reflexivity, committed to polyvocality, and seeks to raise a certain kind of critical awareness.
As the impact of study away experiences on the home campus is virtually uncharted in extant scholarship on mentoring UR, the contribution of authors Duan, Little, Williams, Wagner, and Moritz is especially significant. Their paper describes a collaborative student research project spanning three contexts, two countries and two disciplines. In this unique model, students in a short-term study abroad course in China purchased one artistic object based on pre-departure research that later became part of the Elon University permanent art collection. In the following semester, another group of students in an on-campus course researched the historical meaning and cultural significance of the objects. The project culminated in an on-campus art exhibit showcasing the students’ research, illustrating how a collaborative student research project can serve as an engaging tool to bring short-term study abroad back to campus and mentor cross-disciplinary UR. In the issue’s final paper, authors Krumm, Perkowski, Mecouch, Woods, Shea, Goraya and Tran share an innovative on-campus course design in which students partnered with faculty and museum curators on research projects using digitized natural history collections. This collaboration provided students with opportunities to expand their understanding of global biological issues and experience different research communities.
Future Directions
Our work as co-editors of this special issue offers a unique opportunity to identify promising trajectories for future scholarship on mentoring UR in global contexts. The dialogues among faculty mentors, students, institutional and community partners, and many others, highlight the collaborative, innovative nature of mentoring within and across contexts and the importance of sustained, engaged professional networks to support these interactions longitudinally. The diverse contexts in which our colleagues are working to support student learning and engagement offer fertile opportunities for ongoing scholarship. Future research could analyze case studies that leverage innovative mentoring pedagogies and practices, synthesize salient mentoring practices across contexts, and identify shared challenges and recommended solutions from the perspectives of faculty mentors, students and community partners. The impact of students’ participation in faculty-mentored UR in diverse contexts on the participating institutions, including the home campus and off-campus partners, is an under-studied topic of the utmost importance for higher education. Scholarship examining the integration of two high-impact practices, undergraduate research and diversity/global learning, is essential for the development of evidence-based pedagogies, practices, and programs that support the highest quality teaching and learning. This is an emergent field of scholarship with immense potential and we anticipate future issues of PURM that elucidate the essential role of faculty mentors.
In closing, we would like to acknowledge the insightful, constructive, and expedient feedback that the reviewers offered the authors of this special issue. We also want to thank the Editor-in-Chief of PURM, Dr. Qian Xu, who works diligently to support the authors and editors behind the scenes. By sharing their wisdom and expertise, these scholars augmented the quality of each contribution and the special issue as a whole. We appreciate their contributions and offer them our sincere gratitude for their efforts on behalf of PURM.
Sincerely,
Amy L. Allocco, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Multifaith Scholars, Elon University
Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Director, Center for Research on Global Engagement, Elon University
Reference
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. AAC&U: Washington, D.C.
With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical, she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Domesticating the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities. Details of two relevant publications, including her 2021 cover article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, are listed below.
Relevant Publications
· “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)
· “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Introduction.”
PART I: RITUAL INNOVATION AND POLITICAL POWER
Chapter 2: Nawaraj Chaulagain (Illinois Wesleyan University), “Coronation of the Hindu King: Tradition and Innovation in Nepalese History.”
Chapter 3: Anne T. Mocko (Concordia College), “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy: Notes on Nepal’s Bhoṭo Jātrā, 2006-2008.”
Chapter 4: Michael Baltutis (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Innovating the Ancient, Instantiating the Urban: the South Asian Indra Festival.”
Chapter 5: Luke Whitmore (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “Changes in Ritual Practice at the Himalayan Hindu Shrine of Kedārnāth.”
Chapter 6: Reid B. Locklin (University of Toronto), “Ritual Renunciation and/or Ritual Innovation? Re-describing Advaita Tradition.”
PART II: RITUAL AND THE ECONOMIES OF CASTE AND CLASS
Chapter 7: Matthew R. Sayers (Lebanon Valley College), “Ancestral Rites Re-worked: The Transition from Solemn to Domestic Modes of Feeding the Dead.”
Chapter 8: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu.”
Chapter 9: Shital Sharma (McGill University), “Consuming Kṛṣṇa: Women, Class, and Ritual Economies in Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism.”
PART III: RITUAL AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER
Chapter 10: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University), “Village Widow/Town Priestess:
Innovating Ritual Power in a Pilgrimage Economy.”
Chapter 11: M. Whitney Kelting (Northeastern University), “Leveraging Agency: Young Jain Women’s Ritual Innovations through the Updhān Fast.”
Chapter 12: Liz Wilson (Miami University of Ohio), “Ritual Innovation and Masculine Identity Formation in the Contemporary Cult of Lord Ayyappaṉ.”
PART IV: RITUAL INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 13: Charles S. Preston (University of Chicago), “Dancing the Vedas, Deritualizing Theory: A Study of ‘The Universal Truth’”
Chapter 14: Janet Gunn (Thorneloe College at Laurentian University), “Ganesha and the Chocolate Almonds: Ritual Innovation and Efficacy in Diaspora.”
Chapter 15: Sudharshan Durayappah (University of Toronto) and Corinne Dempsey (Nazareth College), “Recasting Sexuality, Gender, and Family through Contemporary Canadian Ritual Innovation.”
Jennifer D. Ortegren is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose work focuses on the intersections of religion and class among upwardly mobile women, and their families, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. She has published on the everyday and ritual lives of emerging middle-class Hindu women and is currently developing a project among Muslim women, including how class mobility impacts relationships between neighbors from diverse religious backgrounds and the role of women in mediating these relationships.
Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India
Guest Editors: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University) and Jennifer D. Ortegren (Middlebury College)
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/FIR/issue/view/1748
In a research article that contextualizes many of the benefits and challenges of conducting UR in global contexts, authors Vandermaas-Peeler, Allocco, and Fair develop a set of recommendations based on focus groups with students and offer a case study of effective instrumental and psychosocial mentoring practices utilized by mentors in a multidisciplinary research group. In the second paper, Allocco and Fredsell offer an elaborated account of highly engaged mentoring in a joint ethnographic research project in India that transformed not only the research but also the authors’ relationship and identities as scholars and feminists.
Intensive faculty-mentored UR is often conducted during the summer months. Heldt, Smith, Cunningham, and Miller discuss a collaborative model that facilitated students’ work in interdisciplinary and international research teams addressing global health research initiatives, as well as their knowledge and experience in communicating findings with peers and the public as they conducted mentored UR in Denmark.
Kuh (2008) argued that students should participate in at least two high-impact practices (HIPs) to augment opportunities for deep, engaged, and sustained learning. As the authors in the next set of papers demonstrate, the integration of UR and study away programs maximizes this potential. Campbell and Jones describe the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing a research-centered, short-term study abroad program in South Africa. Utilizing their expertise in the fields of history and psychology, the faculty directors scaffold students’ development and conduct of research projects and elucidate students’ perspectives by incorporating their voices into the paper. Bradley and Teitsort share benefits of combining UR and study abroad in course-integrated linguistic fieldwork research, particularly highlighting the advantages for the fields of social science and language science. Hall, Walkington, Vandermaas-Peeler, Shanahan, Gudiksen, and Zimmer offer a framework of salient mentoring practices and demonstrate how it can be used to support an emergent curriculum design project that embeds UR within a study abroad program in Scandinavia. Oppenheim and Knott explore the pedagogical dimensions of digital mentorship within a program that integrates UR and internships in grassroots social impact organizations. In exploring the combination of immersive global service-learning with internship experiences, this research team highlights student inquiry that is grounded in reflexivity, committed to polyvocality, and seeks to raise a certain kind of critical awareness.
As the impact of study away experiences on the home campus is virtually uncharted in extant scholarship on mentoring UR, the contribution of authors Duan, Little, Williams, Wagner, and Moritz is especially significant. Their paper describes a collaborative student research project spanning three contexts, two countries and two disciplines. In this unique model, students in a short-term study abroad course in China purchased one artistic object based on pre-departure research that later became part of the Elon University permanent art collection. In the following semester, another group of students in an on-campus course researched the historical meaning and cultural significance of the objects. The project culminated in an on-campus art exhibit showcasing the students’ research, illustrating how a collaborative student research project can serve as an engaging tool to bring short-term study abroad back to campus and mentor cross-disciplinary UR. In the issue’s final paper, authors Krumm, Perkowski, Mecouch, Woods, Shea, Goraya and Tran share an innovative on-campus course design in which students partnered with faculty and museum curators on research projects using digitized natural history collections. This collaboration provided students with opportunities to expand their understanding of global biological issues and experience different research communities.
Future Directions
Our work as co-editors of this special issue offers a unique opportunity to identify promising trajectories for future scholarship on mentoring UR in global contexts. The dialogues among faculty mentors, students, institutional and community partners, and many others, highlight the collaborative, innovative nature of mentoring within and across contexts and the importance of sustained, engaged professional networks to support these interactions longitudinally. The diverse contexts in which our colleagues are working to support student learning and engagement offer fertile opportunities for ongoing scholarship. Future research could analyze case studies that leverage innovative mentoring pedagogies and practices, synthesize salient mentoring practices across contexts, and identify shared challenges and recommended solutions from the perspectives of faculty mentors, students and community partners. The impact of students’ participation in faculty-mentored UR in diverse contexts on the participating institutions, including the home campus and off-campus partners, is an under-studied topic of the utmost importance for higher education. Scholarship examining the integration of two high-impact practices, undergraduate research and diversity/global learning, is essential for the development of evidence-based pedagogies, practices, and programs that support the highest quality teaching and learning. This is an emergent field of scholarship with immense potential and we anticipate future issues of PURM that elucidate the essential role of faculty mentors.
In closing, we would like to acknowledge the insightful, constructive, and expedient feedback that the reviewers offered the authors of this special issue. We also want to thank the Editor-in-Chief of PURM, Dr. Qian Xu, who works diligently to support the authors and editors behind the scenes. By sharing their wisdom and expertise, these scholars augmented the quality of each contribution and the special issue as a whole. We appreciate their contributions and offer them our sincere gratitude for their efforts on behalf of PURM.
Sincerely,
Amy L. Allocco, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Multifaith Scholars, Elon University
Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Director, Center for Research on Global Engagement, Elon University
Reference
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. AAC&U: Washington, D.C.
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