Collective Karma and Karmic Collectives: Conversations without Borders Seminar
Year three–Karmic theories and bio-social imaginations
We invite panels and papers that inquire into how marginalized groups: (1) employ karma cluster concepts to argue for and bring forth a free, equitable, and complex society, and (2) theorize agency for humans, animals, and other more-than-human actors. We particularly encourage presentations that showcase how these karma-informed social imaginations, from the ground up, enrich, nuance, and/or potentially change the terms of debate in existing conversations about freedom, equity, and justice.
More specifically, the following are themes proposed during our business meeting at AAR 2024. Please email the designated contact person for the theme(s) you are interested in.
- What is karma: from the philosophical to the quotidian, from premodern to modern. This panel looks at how practitioners understand karma and how those who theorize about it advocate for the adoption of their particular doctrinal views (Jennifer EICHMAN, jennifer.eichman@gmail.com)
- Karma and affect: More than merit-making. Many scholars have written that practices done to generate merit function as a transactional instrument for the alleviation of suffering. Because I do X, I get Y. But when our analyses shift from a purely instrumental register to an emotional register, we often discover that there is a much greater nexus of ideas attached to this process and to how people understood karma. Has thinking about karma generated empathy? Anger? Commitment? Shame? (Jennifer EICHMAN, jennifer.eichman@gmail.com)
- Karma, free will, agency (point person?)
- Practices of collective karma (Jessica Zu, xzu@usc.edu)
- Nonhuman karmic collectives (Susanne Kereks, susanne.kerekes@trincoll.edu)
- Workshop panel for past presenters’ publication (Jessica Zu, xzu@usc.edu). This panel will be a closed session, only open to participants, chairs, and steering committee members. It offers a space for polishing one’s past presentations into a special issue (if enough papers cohere around a theme) or individual journal articles. Papers must be pre-circulated.
Scholars interested in themes other than the above-mentioned ones are welcome! If you have further questions and/or suggestions for new topics, feel free to contact the co-chairs, Jessica Zu (xzu@usc.edu) and Susanne Kerekes (susanne.kerekes@trincoll.edu)
Mission Statement
This Seminar investigates karma as shared or communal. Past scholarship has uncritically privileged an individualist approach to karma and has overlooked the centrality of sociokarma in non-canonical sources and lived experiences. Thus, we invite scholars to work together to uncover these marginalized voices “without borders” (across religious traditions, regions, disciplines, and methods). So, how do we bridge conversations without borders? Through a perspective that we call “karma-cluster concepts,” i.e., karma and its related terms in diverse socio-historical contexts.
We invite scholars who can contribute to a fuller picture of the following questions: (1) when, how, and why the debates about individual and collective karma arose in canonical sources and in scholarship; (2) how karma is interpreted in noncanonical texts such as minor commentaries, code of conducts, poetry, theatre, plays, and other forms of storytelling; (3) how collective karma is employed as tools of social engagement (e.g., eco-karma, racial karma, national karma); (4) how karma animates the spiritual practices of marginalized groups such as low-rank ascetic women, working-class lay followers including elderly women, gender and sexual minorities, and people with disabilities; (5) how karma weaves together a world of relations, where spirits, ancestors, animals, trees, rocks, rivers … are agentive; (6) when, how, and why karma drops out of the moral repertoire of a group or a culture; and (7) assessing contemporary philosophical and tradition-based advancements of collective karma as responses to urgent issues.