Anthropological Perspectives on the Jains

The proposed session will reflect on the contributions of the anthropological perspective to Jain Studies, highlighting the connections between the influential work of anthropologists and the work of emerging scholars in Jain studies who have done extensive fieldwork in India. This conversation will provide a stimulus to reinvigorate thinking about how ethnographic methods and anthropological concepts are a constitutive part of Jain Studies, and to reflect on how this inheritance has influenced evolving relationships to fieldwork that increasingly consider positionality and intersubjectivity with Jain interlocutors and community institutions. In the wake of the recent passing of Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb, the panel theme is also a forum for meaningful recognition of his memory and the legacy of his scholarship.

Jain texts and traditions, and their concepts and categories, have increasingly become important as spurs for studies of not just normative ascetic and lay religious praxis but also social phenomena and modes of being in the world. Anthropological work from Weber to Asad has expanded the horizon of work on (and in) Jainism addressing the relationship of culture and religion to politics in India and beyond. Engagement with anthropological theory facilitated the pivotal analytic distinction between Jainism and the Jains, formulated and laid out most explicitly by John Cort, and postmodern anthropological theory later introduced new questions about the categories used to conceptualize Jain identity beyond this distinction. Scholars of Jain studies who engaged in extended fieldwork in India wrote with a reinvigorated attention to the lived experience of Jain ethics, value, and well-being. Terms given in Jain doctrine and espoused by monastic authorities, increasingly interpreted through expansive evaluations of ethics and spheres of value, began to account for voice and language, narrativity, and religious subjectivities. Motivated less by the examination of fixity and boundaries “between,” for example, Jainism and Brahmanical/Hindu traditions or Jainism and Buddhism, these new frontiers point toward the margins and multiplicities within Jain communities and social worlds.

The so-called “ethnographic turn” in Jain studies, as in the discipline of anthropology more broadly, yielded new insights on gender and asceticism, ritual practice, social organization and relationships. Jain studies has both cultivated and drawn from subfield-specific theoretical and methodological innovations from anthropology of religion, visual anthropology, political and economic anthropology and its approaches to community, nation, and society, anthropology of ethics and freedom, and feminist anthropology, leading to corresponding innovations in scholarship from South Asian studies, religious studies, and Jain studies. Recent scholarship on Jain religiosity in diaspora, including examinations of assertions of Jainism’s commensurability with paradigms of ostensibly secular and scientific rationality, highlight the continued relevance of joining the two fields.

Participants will explore a range of topics, including reflections throughout on the challenges and opportunities of cultivating an ethnographic sensibility, that is, understanding ethnography as a way of knowing that encompasses method, theory, and writing. Ethnography—ethnos meaning “folk/the people” and grapho meaning “to write”—is here recognized as an epistemological practice committed to illuminating the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of Jain identity and subjectivity, situated in local and global social networks as well as historical narratives.

The first paper contextualizes the coordinates for this interdisciplinary conversation through a retrospective study of three periods of Alan Babb’s early fieldwork, situating his later work on Jainism—some of the most generative ethnographic work on Jainism with wide-ranging relevance and influence on conversations that developed in Indology and religious studies—in a longer arc of his anthropological engagement with religion in South Asia. The second paper revisits the work of Max Weber to take up and interrogate numerous longstanding suggestions of comparability between Jains and Protestants, introducing a further vernacular comparison from fieldwork that likens Jains to Jews. The paper examines how the appearance of such correspondences in sociological/anthropological and religious studies literatures, as well as everyday life, discursively locates Jains within economic systems and indexes social and political relations that shape how Jains perceive themselves and are perceived in relation to Indian and global capitalism. The third paper introduces a perspective from the position of “Jain studies at home,” examining “spiritual tourism” among Jains at two temples in Jaipur, reimagining notions of the field, space, and place through changes in the built environment of a city that has long been at the center of ethnographic fieldwork with Jain communities. The fourth paper moves from the temple to the home, drawing on ethnographic attention to the domestic, the everyday, and quotidian action. This paper particularly attends to unmarked but gendered norms of asceticism in household fasting and the ritualized domestic space in laywomen’s practice of sallekhana, the Jain ritual fast until death, as a mode of rethinking theorization of Jain ritual. The fifth and final paper traces the development of new gotras or caste lineages originating with yatis. This paper both illuminates contemporary Jain participation in caste identities and the enduring, evolving relevance of the tension between renunciation and worldly life through consideration of yati transgressions of monastic conduct and the social implications of resulting kinship formations within Jain communities.

In sum, this session seeks to share insights on the complexities of Jain social worlds from fieldwork in ways that shed light on critical themes for contemporary Jain studies that build on, turn to, and increasingly generate anthropological perspectives in significant ways.