Daily pūjā: moralizing dharma in the BAPS Swaminarayan Hindu tradition
Each morning most members of BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, a transnational Hindu tradition, perform a personal devotional ritual called nityapūjā in which they engage in both somatic and cognitive practices for about half an hour. Drawing from the ethnographic data collected at the San Jose chapter of...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| WorldCat: | WorldCat |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2016
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| In: |
Nidān
Year: 2016, Volume: 1, Issue: 2, Pages: 88-109 |
| Further subjects: | B
Ethics
B Modernity B Transnationalism B Swaminarayan Sanstha B BAPS B Ritual performance |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Each morning most members of BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, a transnational Hindu tradition, perform a personal devotional ritual called nityapūjā in which they engage in both somatic and cognitive practices for about half an hour. Drawing from the ethnographic data collected at the San Jose chapter of BAPS and mapping it onto a theory of normative ethics, this paper examines how such religious rituals help their practitioners negotiate secular concerns and conditions, come to terms with stress and anxiety, and make sense of their spiritual experiences. It proposes a ritual-moral model that provides a holistic approach to rethinking the time-worn category "dharma" as an ethical analytic in the context of how Hinduism is reimagined and lived in the 21st century. By exploring the relationship between Hindu devotional rituals and everyday ethics of their practitioners, this model demonstrates how ritually informed ethics create possibilities for exercising moral agency, developing constructive intersubjectivities, and managing sociocultural factors. |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2016.2 |