Dr Neena Mahadev is an anthropologist whose research engages an array of empirical and theoretical debates on religion, pluralism, political economy, violence, religious media and mediations, and political theologies, with specific focus on South Asia, and the inter-Asian entailments of “Bandung humanisms.” Her ethnographic work centers on Buddhism and Christianity based upon extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and also in Singapore. Her book, Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (2023) was published by Columbia University Press https://cup.columbia.edu/book/karma-and-grace/9780231205290. It was named winner of the Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University. https://www.ircpl.columbia.edu/claremont-winners
Dr Mahadev is currently developing two new book projects. One is on cosmopolitanism and the inter-Asian Buddhist revival. Another project is an ethnographic and archival study of ecumenical and “post-nationalist” forms of Christianity in Asia.
Before joining Yale-NUS, Dr Mahadev was a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She carried out ethnographic research on Buddhist and Christian communities, focusing on itineraries of movement between South and Southeast Asia. As a Postdoctoral Fellow within the Transregional Research Network at the University of Göttingen (Germany), she worked with anthropologists and historians of religion to study the ‘Politics of Secularism and the Emergence of New Religiosities’ in Asia. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Sociology/Anthropology from Carleton College.
Dr Mahadev serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Global Buddhism, and on the board of New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity book series. She has held a stewardship role as an Advisory Board Member of Omnia Institute, an international organisation dedicated to grassroots Inter-Religious Peacemaking work in several sites of conflict. In 2023, she served as an Advisor on the Pew Research Center’s extensive survey on Religion and Pluralism in South and Southeast Asia.
At Yale-NUS, Dr Mahadev teaches courses including Religion and Media, Anthropology of Violence, Political Theologies in Asian Lifeworlds, Christianities in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Introduction to Anthropology, and Modern Social Thought.
Dr Mahadev published a book entitled Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023). The work is based on more than 28 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka, plus longer standing engagements in Sri Lanka since 1998. It examines Buddhist-Christian tensions over religious conversion, and the politicisation of religion around the turn of the new millennium. It explores how Pentecostal-charismatic and Roman Catholic practices articulate in a predominantly Buddhist context, and illuminates the highly mediatised contestations over Buddhists’ and Christians’ distinctive projections about the religious future. The ethnography captures the perspectival tangles of religiosity in the context of war and post-war, wherein Buddhists and Christians assert distinctive timelines of the new millennium and different paradigms for the religious future of the nation.
Dr. Mahadev’s latest research focuses on religious revival, governmentality, Bandung internationalism, and the religious legacies of the ‘Cold’ War in South and Southeast Asia. She is preparing to undertake multi-sited ethnographic and archival study on the flows of political-economic and religious influence between South and Southeast Asian cities.
From 2020 to 2021, Dr Mahadev collaborated with colleagues at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore to examine religion, media, and mediatic adaptations of ritual during the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia. She also worked with several Yale-NUS students on the project, training them in ethnographic methods, digital-ethnography, and theories of religion and media. She received research support from the Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund at Yale-NUS.
Before joining Yale-NUS, Dr Mahadev carried out fieldwork and published on religious communities and secular economic configurations in Singapore, focusing on itineraries of religious revival, development models, and charitable aid and social influence, that move with and influence religious practitioners who travel between South and Southeast Asia.
Research Specialisations
• Anthropology of religion
• Religious studies (Theravada Buddhism; Pentecostalism, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism)
• Political anthropology
• Religion, media, technology, and mediated rituals of religious intercession
• Pluralism
• Ethnic and racial politics
• Nationalism
• Populism
• Conflict and peace
• Legacies of the Cold War
• Bandung internationalism
• Urban development and land dispossession
• Postcolonial theory and subaltern studies
• South Asia, Southeast Asia
• Inter-Asian Studies
Books
Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka. Book Series on Religion, Culture, and Public Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
*Winner* ~ Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion (2021), awarded for book manuscript, by
the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University.
Journal Articles
“The Charism of the Christian Left: Political Dissidence as Religious Habit in Times of Bi-polar Theopolitics.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Spring 2022, Vol 40(1), 84-103.
“Religion & the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mediating Presence and Distance.” Critical Introduction by Lorea, Mahadev, Lang, and Chen. Religion, April 2022, 52:2, 177-198. (Special edited collection, p 177-321.)
“Postwar Blood: Sacrifice, Anti-Sacrifice, and the Rearticulations of Conflict in Sri Lanka,” special section on “Siting Pluralism,” in Walton and Mahadev (eds). Religion & Society: Advances in Research. Volume 10. 2019. 130-150.
“Siting Pluralism: Spatialities of Religious Difference.” Critical introduction by J.F. Walton & N. Mahadev. Religion & Society: Advances in Research. Vol.10. Dec 2019. 81-91. (Special edited collection, p. 81-170.)
“Karma & Grace: Rivalrous Reckonings of Fortune and Misfortune.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 9(2). 2019. 421-438.
“Economies of Conversion and Ontologies of Difference: Buddhism, Christianity, and Adversarial Political Perception in Sri Lanka.” Current Anthropology. December 2018. 59(6): 665-690.
“The Maverick Dialogics of Religious Rivalry in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Inspiration and Contestation in a New Messianic Buddhist Movement.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. March 2016, Vol. 22(1): 127-147.
Book Chapters
“Buddhist ‘Magic’ and Buddhist Modernism: Karma, Relatedness, and Hungry Ghosts in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Lived Buddhism, forthcoming 2024.
“Sonic Fields of Protection in Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 Pandemic.” N. Mahadev and N. Gajaweera, in CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age, ed. Hertzman, Lang, Larsen, Lorea, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2023, 199-202.
“Kuweni & Vijaya Retold: Sri Lanka’s Postwar Iconography as an Affirmation of Inter-Community Mixing.” Multi-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka, Whitaker, Pathmanesan, and Rajasingham-Senanayake (eds). Routledge. 2021.
“Secularism and Religious Modernity in Singapore and Sri Lanka: Transregional Revivalism Considered.” In Secularism in South, East and Southeast Asia, Peter van der Veer and Kenneth Dean (eds). Global Diversities series, Palgrave Press. 2019. 289-311.
“Conversion and Anti-Conversion in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Christian Evangelism and Buddhist Views of the Ethics of Religious Attraction,” in Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Asia, ed. Finucane, Feener. Singapore: Asia Research Institute (ARI)-Springer. 2014. p. 211-235.
• Religion and Media
• Anthropology of Violence
• Political Theologies in Asian Lifeworlds
• Christianities in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Introduction to Anthropology
• Modern Social Thought
