Contributors

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Greg Booth is a scholar of South Asian music and culture. He is the author of a recent book on brass wedding bands in South Asia, Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (Oxford 2005), as well as articles on tabla and the oral tradition. His current research focuses on the music, musicians, and culture of the commercial Hindi cinema.

Isabelle Clark-Deces (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1995, associate professor) (religion, ritual theory, ethnography, India) has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Tamilnadu in South India. Her main interests lie in the experiential force of symbols, in the transformative powers of ritual processes and in the relations between cosmology, society, and self. She is the author of Religion Against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals (as Isabelle Nabokov), No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs and Graveyard Petitions and The Encounter Never Ends: a Return to the Field of Tamil Rituals (in press). She teaches courses on India, ritual and myth, religion and magic, and on the reading of ethnographic texts. Professor Clark-Decès held the Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptorship for 1999-2002. Matthias Frenz obtained his doctorate from Heidelberg University in the field of religious studies. Trained as an indologist and anthropologist he has conducted extensive fieldwork at various Christian shrines and pilgrimage centres in India. The religious interaction between Christians and Hindus in southern India is his main interest. Frenz currently works in academic management.

Muhammad Hassan is a journalist and senior faculty member at the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism at Federal Government Degree College, Skardu, Baltistan in the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. He has been contributing investigative reports and articles on e.g. financial and administrative corruption in public departments to journals such as Takbeer, Ghazi and Daily Ummat. He was a visiting PhD student at Roskilde University in Denmark in 2001-2.

Knut A. Jacobsen is professor in the History of Religions at the University of Bergen, Norway, and author and editor of 15 books and more than 60 articles in journals and edited volumes on various aspects on religions in South Asia and the South Asian diasporas. Recent publications include the edited volumes South Asians in the Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions (Brill, 2004) (with Pratap Kumar) and Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson (Brill, 2005), and Sikhismen: Historie, Tradisjon og Kultur (Kristiansand: Norwegian Academic Press, 2006).

P. Pratap Kumar is Professor of Hinduism and Comparative Religions in the School of Religion and Theology, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. His latest publications include Methods and Theories in the Study of Religions: Perspectives from the Study of Hinduism and other Indian Religions (Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan Publications 2004) and the edited volume Religious Pluralism and the Diaspora (Leiden: E.J, Brill, 2006).

James G. Lochtefeld is Professor of Religion at Carthage College, and his research examines the relationship between Hindu texts, tradition, and modern religious life. His early work focused on Hardwar, and his ongoing work analyzes how this and other pilgrimage sites are being affected by tourism promotion and other social changes.

Brigitte Luchesi teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is a trained sociologist, historian of religion and social anthropologist working since many years on forms of local religion in North India and on religious practises of Hindu immigrants from South Asia in Germany. Stig Toft Madsen is Senior Researcher at NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen. An anthropologist and sociologist by training, he has contributed to the study of South Asian environments, village India, urban professions, subcontinental history, current politics, human rights and security studies.

Kristina Myrvold is a PhD Candidate in History and Anthropology of Religion, specializing in Sikh and Punjab Studies, at Lund University. Her doctoral thesis focuses on religious practices and textual uses among the Sikhs in Varanasi, India, where she has conducted fieldwork for several years.

Selva J. Raj is Stanley S. Kresge Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Albion College, Michigan, USA. His research interests are in the areas of ritual exchange between Hindus and Catholics in south India, Indian Christian diaspora in the United States, Hindu women saints, and contemporary women’s movements in India. Author of numerous articles, he has co-edited three volumes: Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines (SUNY Press, 2002), Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2006), and Miracle as Modern Conundrum in South Asian Religious Traditions (SUNY, forthcoming).

Hugh van Skyhawk is professor of comparative religion in the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Quaid-i-Azam University (Islamabad). His areas of specialisation include devotional religion in Hindu-Muslim contexts (bhakti-sants and Sufi pirs), devotional literature in Old Marathi, pilgrimage centres in the Deccan and the Punjab, spirit cults in the Karakoram; Burushaski, Domaaki, Sanskrit, and the ethnography of communication.

Pierre-Yves Trouillet is a Ph. D. candidate in Social Geography at the University of Bordeaux 3 (France). His research deals with the socio-territorial aspects of religions, focusing on Murukan, a Hindu deity deeply linked with the Tamil identity. His work is concerned with a multi-scaled analysis of socio-religious territories in South India and in the Tamil Diaspora.

Mariam Abou Zahab, a political scientist by training, is a researcher affiliated to CERI (Centre d'/tudes et de recherches internationales) and a lecturer at INALCO (National Institute of Oriental Languages) in Paris. She has undertaken research on sectarianism and on jihadi movements in Pakistan and has written a number of book chapters and articles on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Vineeta Sinha is Associate Professor and teaches at the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include among other areas, the critique of concepts and categories in the social sciences, sociology and anthropology of religion and the Hindu Diaspora. Her first book, A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore, (Singapore University Press & Nordic Institute of Asian Studies 2005).