About the project
Maritime goddesses in East and Southeast Asia are among the most popular deities in the world. They play central roles in the ritual lives of billions of people.
These goddesses are often associated with bodies of water such as seas, oceans, rivers, and deltas. They can move, change shape, and transcend political and ontological boundaries.
The project “MARGO” offers a large-scale study of goddess worship in Asia with a multidisciplinary and comparative approach. We will compare different practices across national borders and historical periods.
The project will investigate three questions:
- How have people in East and Southeast Asian places related to their goddesses in everyday life?
- How do the goddesses relate to the larger maritime and riverine environments in which they are embedded?
- How have these goddesses travelled and changed in response to social and environmental transformations?
Objectives
MARGO has three overarching objectives.
First, the project will challenge problematic classification models in the study of Asian religions. Instead, we will promote a comparative and transnational study of worship traditions and focus on lived religion.
Second, we will build bridges between the study of religion and the environmental humanities. In doing so, we continue the work started in the previous ERC project “Whales of Power”. We will particularly focus on the emerging field of “blue humanities,” which explores the human relationship to the sea.
Third, we will develop a new theory of ritual. We will do this by investigating rituals as affective and embodied care practices that mediate relationships between humans and natural environments.
