Books by Philippe Bornet
Significant Others, Significant Encounters, 2023
The chapter analyses the transnational life of an image of the child Mary as it travelled from It... more The chapter analyses the transnational life of an image of the child Mary as it travelled from Italy to India around the end of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches out some methodological and theoretical considerations. The second part recounts the image's origins, as it was modelled in wax by a Franciscan nun around 1735, and its development in Italy with the Sisters of Charity, and then across Europe through ecclesiastical networks. In the third section, the contribution deals with the image's appropriation in South India, and especially in the region of Mangalore (Karnataka, India). Retaining some of the characteristics of the "original" image (in particular, its relation to health), the Indian context gave it additional dimensions: a relation to harvests, a celebration with many elements borrowed from a South Indian Hindu framework, and a specific relation to the Konkani-speaking Roman Catholic community of Mangalore. Comparing European and Indian evidence, the chapter concludes by asking to what extent the image's usage in both contexts reflects (or not) different visual cultures.
Interweaving Histories: Itineraries between India and Switzerland (1900-1950), 2023
The chapter focuses on the career of a Swiss missionary who developed an interest in texts (in pa... more The chapter focuses on the career of a Swiss missionary who developed an interest in texts (in particular the corpus of vacanas) of the Liṅgāyat community in Karnataka, Jakob Urner (1883-1961). Beginning with biographical elements about Urner in Switzerland and then in India, the chapter looks at the "revival" of the Liṅgāyat tradition in the early twentieth century in relation to local identity claims. Replacing the creation of editions of the vacanasi nt his context, the chapter analyses Urner'st ranslation of these texts from the 1920s onwards. The role of his teacher of the Kannada language, Channappa Uttangi (1881-1962), is highlighted, and some extracts from the later correspondence between the two men are analysed. The chapter concludes by examining a possible influence of Urner - whose work has remained unpublished - on the missionary and later university professor Carl-Albert Keller (1920-2008).
Interweaving histories: Itineraries between India and Switzerland (1900-1950), 2023
The chapter deals with the biographies of two women doctors who ran mission hospitals in Udupi an... more The chapter deals with the biographies of two women doctors who ran mission hospitals in Udupi and Betageri (Karnataka) in the period between the 1920s and 1954: Eva Lombard (1890-1978) and Elisabeth Petitpierre (1893-1983). A focus on the formative years in Switzerland attempts to recontextualize both itineraries within ahistory of the accessibility of medical studies for women and of missionary vocations in theSwiss-French part of Switzerland. Several aspects of their activity in the mission hospitals of Udupi and Betageri are then analysed: the links between "scientific" medicine and religion in this context, the institution of the hospital as a closed space in which behaviours and values could be propagated, the relations with local medical traditions, and the cultural compromises that had to be negotiated, notably with respect to castes and food. In conclusion, the image of India propagated in Switzerland by the two protagonists is considered, underlining all the ambiguities of their position, between feminism, religious commitment, orientalism and imperialism.
Interwaving Histories: Itineraries between Switzerland and India (1900-1950), 2023
The chapter deals with the history of the Basel Mission in South India at the end of the First Wo... more The chapter deals with the history of the Basel Mission in South India at the end of the First World War, and of am issionary organization based in Lausanne which took over in theperiod from 1918 to 1928, the so-called Kanarese Evangelical Mission. The firstpart of the chapter looks back at the context of the BaselMissioninSouth India and the difficulties caused by theorganization's links with Germany during the First World War. The different stages of the creation of the Kanarese Evangelical Mission are then presented, before analysing the tense political context in which the missionaries found themselves caught up, both in Switzerland and in India. Particular attention is paid to the dissident movements that developed within the missioninIndia, and to the relations with the Indian nationalist movements and ideologies. The conclusion deals with the longer-term consequenceso ft his episode, in connection with the development of international ecumenical institutions and pacifist ideologies in Switzerland.
Interweaving Histories: Itineraries between Switzerland and India (1900-1950), 2023
T his introductory chapter outlines different aspects of relations between India and Switzerland ... more T his introductory chapter outlines different aspects of relations between India and Switzerland during the firsthalf of the twentieth century, focusing on the topics of mission, travel, and translation. Transnational themes such as the political context of the aftermath of the First World War, the print media boom, and the women'sr ights movement are aspects that influenced the relations between India and Switzerland in no small way. This can be verified by looking at the itineraries of individual Indian and Swiss actors going back and forth between India and Switzerland in this period, exploring new or different ideas or practices:t ravellers, orientalists, translators and politicala ctivists. No less important as channels of exchange were institutions, such as Christian missions and various religious movements centred in India and seeking to spread to the West. The chapter finally turns to thev ery telling example of transnational yoga, which brings into play all the dimensions described earlier.
Translocal Lives and Religion examines the intellectual trajectories of remarkable individuals wh... more Translocal Lives and Religion examines the intellectual trajectories of remarkable individuals who interacted with religious discourses, doctrines or practices in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inspired by S. Subrahmanyam and S. Gruzinski’s historiographical model of “connected histories,” this book introduces the approach of “connected religion” and invites the study of cross-cultural and “translocal” encounters by bringing together documents that represent diverse aspects of the story and reconstructing a narrative from diverse standpoints, with analytical potential. Testing this approach through specific cases of interactions between Asia and Europe, the volume explores the little-known stories of actors such as migrants or expatriates interacting with religious discourses, and of religious leaders producing and propagating beliefs and practices. The cases pose questions that can be applied to further contexts, such as: the significance of improved travels and communications for the diffusion of religious content across national, cultural and institutional boundaries; the impact of specific individuals, charismatic or not, well established or subaltern in the reconfiguration of institutional forms of religion; and the role of the South Asian referent in legitimating the propagation of specific religious views. Offering both an innovative methodological framework and original cases based on new research, the book will be of interest to scholars of religion, to specialists of South Asia in late modernity and to the broader public.
See th full text: https://archive.org/details/svetlana-gorshenina-et-al.-eds.-masters-and-natives... more See th full text: https://archive.org/details/svetlana-gorshenina-et-al.-eds.-masters-and-natives-digging-the-others-past/page/4/mode/2up
The book focuses on the relational dynamic between “masters” and “natives” in the construction of scholarly narratives about the past, in the fields of archeology, history or the study of religions. Reconsidering the role of subaltern actors that recent postcolonial studies have tended to ignore, the present book emphasizes the complex relations between representatives of the imperial power and local actors, and analyzes how masters and natives (and their respective cultures) have shaped each other in the course of the interaction. Through various vectors of intercultural transfer and knowledge exchange, through the circulation of ideas, techniques and human beings, new visions of the past of extra-European regions emerged, as did collective memories resulting from various kinds of appropriations. In this framework, the most important question is how these dynamic processes determined collective memories of the past in plural (post-)colonial – in particular, Asian – worlds, participating to the construction of national/imperial/local identities and to the reinvention of traditions.
Forum de discussions à propos de ce livre: “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past (Svetlana Gorshenina, Philippe Bornet, Michel E. Fuchs, Claude Rapin [Eds.], Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019): Book Discussion Forum (Fiona Kidd, Elise Luneau, Marek Jan Olbrycht, Mikhail Shenkar, Michele Minardi, Gian Luca Bonora, Simon Mantellini, Carlo Lippolis), Bulletin of IICAS, No. 29, 2020, рр. 108-123 (en anglais); “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past: Форум обсуждения книги, Вестник МИЦАИ (Самарканд), Вып. 29, 2020, стр. 109-126 (en russe).
L’orientalisme des marges: Eclairages à partir de l’Inde et de la Russie, Lausanne: Etudes de lettres, 2014, Oct 10, 2014
Through a number of cases forgotten from postcolonial critique, this book explores the notion o... more Through a number of cases forgotten from postcolonial critique, this book explores the notion of “margins”, geographical as well as epistemological, in the context of Saïd’s orientalism. Bringing together the Anglo-Indian case, often considered as a classical form of orientalism, and the Russo-Soviet case, both object of Western orientalism and itself a producer of orientalist discourses, the study invites to shift the perspective from the imperial Franco-British spaces towards less traditional comparisons. Going beyond a binary model opposing “colonizers” to “colonized”, the approach analyzes the mechanisms of knowledge production (arts, languages, literatures, religions etc.) and their transfers in colonial settings, as well as local appropriations and (re)inventions of hybrid traditions. Crossing perspectives in such a way helps to analyze the ambiguity of situations that unfolded during and after periods of imperial domination in the triangle of India, Russia and Europe.
Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité : Mondes juifs et indiens anciens, Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2010., 2010
Examining the rites and practices of hospitality recorded in Jewish rabbinic and Indian Brahmanic... more Examining the rites and practices of hospitality recorded in Jewish rabbinic and Indian Brahmanic literature, the book shows that hospitality is a sensitive and crucial institution in ancient societies. Hospitality practices reflect essential values, such as the preservation of traditional knowledge and social organization. The book offers also a fresh reexamination of the comparative method in the study of religion.
Religions in Play: Games, Rituals, and Virtual Worlds, Zürich: Pano, 2012., 2012
Papers by Philippe Bornet
This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associated with a mi... more This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associated with a missionary society. The book provides a visual panorama of all the world's cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of material that had initially appeared in a variety of other contexts, ranging from missionary periodicals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume's editors wanted to convey: the extra-European world was portrayed as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents – in particular, missionaries – as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings based on photographs were often not as polemical as those based on drawings, simply because of the characteristics of photography as a medium. Complicating the critical reading of the im...
Translocal Lives and Religion: Connections Between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World, 2021
Introducing the notion of "connected history" and situating it among other related approaches ("g... more Introducing the notion of "connected history" and situating it among other related approaches ("global history", "comparative history", "entangled history", "cultural transfers", etc.), the chapter examines the potentialities as well as the challenges it presents for the comparative study of religions. Building on recent considerations about a critical "comparative religion", it is argued that a "connected religion" approach has the potential to both criticize classical taxonomies and construct alternative ways to think about concepts and practices about religion. In order to assess the approach, two examples are introduced and contrasted: Looking at F.M. Müller's involvement with Bengali (Dwarkanath Tagore, Debendranath Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen), Marathi (Behramji Malabari) and Japanese scholars (Nanjo Bunyu and Kenjiu Kasawara), it is argued that the orientalist project is not only better understood when re-contextualized in this global context, but that it also had consequences beyond the scholarly world, offering opportunities to all involved actors. The second example explores the encounter of a Swiss missionary, Jakob Urner, with specialists of the Vīraśaiva literatures such as Channappa Uttangi. In so doing, attention is paid to the often discordant and oppositional dynamics constitutive of political and religious processes, to the development of scholarly representations (mainstream or marginal), and to their impact on the study of religions as an academic discipline. It is also suggested that such an approach is better carried out in a collaborative framework, since it generally involves dealing with sources that stem from various cultural, institutional or linguistic backgrounds.
Études de lettres, 2014
Alors que son idée remonte à plusieurs années, le colloque qui a donné lieu à la présente publica... more Alors que son idée remonte à plusieurs années, le colloque qui a donné lieu à la présente publication a été profilé pour marquer la réunion, au sein de la Faculté des lettres de l'Université de Lausanne, des sections des langues et civilisations slaves et des langues et civilisations orientales 1 . Cette mutualisation a eu pour résultat la création d'une nouvelle section de langues et civilisations slaves et de l'Asie du Sud. Forte de deux pôles de compétences, la Russie et l'Inde, cette section couvre finalement une aire aux contours inédits qui s'étale, à travers l'Eurasie, de l'Europe orientale au Sri Lanka et au Bangladesh.
(Resume de l'ouvrage) Le facteur religieux intervient dans le processus europeen d'integr... more (Resume de l'ouvrage) Le facteur religieux intervient dans le processus europeen d'integration. Aujourd'hui, le debat sur le preambule de la constitution europeenne met en scene l'importance des heritages religieux dans l'identite civilisationnelle de l'Europe. Mais la facon d'exprimer cette identite suscite bien des debats au sein des mondes religieux et laiques. La question centrale est celle de l'acceptation de la societe pluraliste et de la laicite des institutions publiques. Il s'agit d'un defi autant pour les pays de tradition orthodoxe, aujourd'hui confrontes au pluralisme religieux qu'a entraine l'ouverture democratique, que pour les pays de tradition judeo-chretienne qui doivent compter avec la presence etablie de communautes musulmanes d'horizons et de generations diverses. Le succes des religions et des spiritualites orientales, tel que le bouddhisme, engendre lui aussi des attitudes diversifiees du croire en modernite. Continent marque par des dechirures geographiques, ideologiques et religieuses, l'Europe est aujourd'hui le terrain de recomposition economiques, politiques et juridiques. Produit d'une science des religions ouverte et prospective, le present ouvrage veut collaborer, a l'aide d'approches et de methodes diverses, a la recherche de valeurs federatives pour l'Europe de demain. La majorite des contributions reunies ont ete presentees lors du troisieme cycle en science des religions organise en 2003 par la Conference Universitaire de Suisse occidentale (CUSO).
Journal for Religion, Film and Media, 2021
This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associated with a mi... more This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associated with a missionary society. The book provides a visual panorama of all the world's cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of material that had initially appeared in a variety of other contexts, ranging from missionary periodicals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume's editors wanted to convey: the extra-European world was portrayed as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents-in particular, missionaries-as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings based on photographs were often not as polemical as those based on drawings, simply because of the characteristics of photography as a medium. Complicating the critical reading of the images as simply missionary propaganda, I argue that a volume like the one examined here is best understood when placed within a transnational (or connected) history of visual practices.
Recherches amérindiennes au Québec
Entangled Religions
This contribution offers a review of:William E. Paden: New Patterns for Comparative Religion. Pas... more This contribution offers a review of:William E. Paden: New Patterns for Comparative Religion. Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective.London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 264 pages, $114.00/£ 85.00, ISBN (hardback) 978-1-4742-5210-2.
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Books by Philippe Bornet
The book focuses on the relational dynamic between “masters” and “natives” in the construction of scholarly narratives about the past, in the fields of archeology, history or the study of religions. Reconsidering the role of subaltern actors that recent postcolonial studies have tended to ignore, the present book emphasizes the complex relations between representatives of the imperial power and local actors, and analyzes how masters and natives (and their respective cultures) have shaped each other in the course of the interaction. Through various vectors of intercultural transfer and knowledge exchange, through the circulation of ideas, techniques and human beings, new visions of the past of extra-European regions emerged, as did collective memories resulting from various kinds of appropriations. In this framework, the most important question is how these dynamic processes determined collective memories of the past in plural (post-)colonial – in particular, Asian – worlds, participating to the construction of national/imperial/local identities and to the reinvention of traditions.
Forum de discussions à propos de ce livre: “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past (Svetlana Gorshenina, Philippe Bornet, Michel E. Fuchs, Claude Rapin [Eds.], Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019): Book Discussion Forum (Fiona Kidd, Elise Luneau, Marek Jan Olbrycht, Mikhail Shenkar, Michele Minardi, Gian Luca Bonora, Simon Mantellini, Carlo Lippolis), Bulletin of IICAS, No. 29, 2020, рр. 108-123 (en anglais); “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past: Форум обсуждения книги, Вестник МИЦАИ (Самарканд), Вып. 29, 2020, стр. 109-126 (en russe).
Papers by Philippe Bornet
The book focuses on the relational dynamic between “masters” and “natives” in the construction of scholarly narratives about the past, in the fields of archeology, history or the study of religions. Reconsidering the role of subaltern actors that recent postcolonial studies have tended to ignore, the present book emphasizes the complex relations between representatives of the imperial power and local actors, and analyzes how masters and natives (and their respective cultures) have shaped each other in the course of the interaction. Through various vectors of intercultural transfer and knowledge exchange, through the circulation of ideas, techniques and human beings, new visions of the past of extra-European regions emerged, as did collective memories resulting from various kinds of appropriations. In this framework, the most important question is how these dynamic processes determined collective memories of the past in plural (post-)colonial – in particular, Asian – worlds, participating to the construction of national/imperial/local identities and to the reinvention of traditions.
Forum de discussions à propos de ce livre: “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past (Svetlana Gorshenina, Philippe Bornet, Michel E. Fuchs, Claude Rapin [Eds.], Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019): Book Discussion Forum (Fiona Kidd, Elise Luneau, Marek Jan Olbrycht, Mikhail Shenkar, Michele Minardi, Gian Luca Bonora, Simon Mantellini, Carlo Lippolis), Bulletin of IICAS, No. 29, 2020, рр. 108-123 (en anglais); “Masters” and “Natives”. Digging the Others’ Past: Форум обсуждения книги, Вестник МИЦАИ (Самарканд), Вып. 29, 2020, стр. 109-126 (en russe).
In English.
Inspired by the historiographical model of “connected histories” (Sanjay Subrahmanyam), the panel focuses on the detailed “trajectories” of individual actors and pays equal attention to the different contexts and perspectives entailed. Studies taking clues from this approach include biographical reassessments of travelers, “explorers”, missionaries, pilgrims, scholars, students, tourists, etc. In the context of the study of religions, this perspective can be used to explore not only the circulation of religious concepts and practices, but also the issues such as the dynamism of “religious identities” and interactions between institutional and individual actors. The variety of contexts and actors display interactions that can be developed in many directions, providing a rich set of examples to reassess binary or unidirectional narratives of change.
Bringing together selected cases involving European as well as non-European actors, the panel compares “transnational encounters” that involve religious issues (19th-20th centuries). Those issues essentially center on two levels: (1) on a conceptual and historiographical level, how did contacts and travels of individuals contribute to spread globally concepts of “religion”? Did they contribute to building stereotyped conceptions of religion? Or did they, on the contrary, extend the range of possible ideas on “religion”? (2) On a practical level, the panel reflects on the consequences of those contacts for individual and institutional religious practices and ideas. What mechanisms (appropriation, mimicry, subversion, translation etc.) characterize those processes? In which measure do those trajectories witness a multiplicity of “lived religions” that deviate from institutional conceptions of religion?
La recherche se développe autour de trois axes thématiques :
(1) le voyage comme modalité de la rencontre (encounter), avec notamment les exemples d’E. Maillart et Toru Dutt. Il s’agit ici de réfléchir aux cultures du voyage, en Inde et en Suisse, puis de se focaliser sur le parcours de quelques voyageurs et voyageuses, afin de montrer les spécificités de ce type de représentation culturelle.
(2) la langue comme lieu de médiation entre les cultures, avec une analyse des publications de J. Herbert, M. Ladner, R. von Muralt, L. Reymond et Swami Yatiswarananda. Nous examinons ici d’importantes figures suisses et indiennes qui ont largement contribué à élaborer des représentations de modèles culturels éloignés de l’horizon de leurs audiences respectives, en lien notamment avec le christianisme ou la société européenne en Inde et les religions de l’Inde en Europe.
(3) la mission comme lieu d’échanges, avec notamment le cas de la mission de Bâle et la figure de C.-A. Keller, dont l’influence s’est exercée autant en Suisse qu’en Inde. Il s’agit d’explorer les questions de la circulation des idées et des reconfigurations savantes, par le biais d’un vocabulaire religieux. Les activités de la mission de Bâle au sud de l’Inde sont à cet égard particulièrement intéressantes : elles ont eu des conséquences non seulement sur les cultures locales, mais aussi sur la représentation des religions de l’Inde en Europe.
Partant d’une perspective d’“histoire connectée” qui prône l’utilisation de sources de tous les partenaires de l’interaction, à “parts égales”, la recherche examine plusieurs lieux, moments et figures de la rencontre afin de mettre à jour autant les mécanismes ayant présidé à ces relations que leurs effets sur les cultures locales. Le projet exploite des fonds d’archives inédits, car accessibles depuis peu de temps seulement. Le projet comprend aussi plusieurs entretiens avec des acteurs ayant collaboré avec des figures centrales de nos travaux (oral history).
Plus largement, la posture intellectuelle qui fonde notre approche, au carrefour entre les études indiennes et l’histoire comparée des religions contribue aux études qui explorent l’histoire connectée (ou entangled histories) entre l’Europe et l’Asie. L’importance de cet axe de réflexion – Europe-Asie – ne doit plus être démontrée, mais notre contribution portant sur les mécanismes de la rencontre, des acteurs ciblés, et des micro-thématiques précises apporte des éléments nouveaux pour la réflexion scientifique.
for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer 3 (2016)