Jagannath’s Travels and Transformations from Puri to the Bay: A New Material Biography of Deities

This paper proposes a new framework for considering divine embodiment through the figure of Jagannath, tracing the deity’s pilgrimage from Odisha to the Hindu diaspora of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than privileging the god’s "original" wooden mūrti and temple in Puri, this dissertation research focuses on the experiences of Bay Area devotees. Employing ethnography along with art history and material culture studies, the paper argues that Jagannath’s seemingly all-encompassing body exists as a network of more particular material bodies, an overlapping series of avatāras manifested across mūrtis, home shrines, and even souvenir images and artist re-creations. Each one, however unofficial, authentically establishes the deity's presence while expanding his body to encompass the experiences of ever-new devotees, as well as the material realities of their time and place. Jagannath offers a new model for the old material biographies: an expanded body that can be traced across various materialities.