Imagining Religious Communities

Abstract

Abstract Based on ethnographic research with a transnational Hindu family and its social networks, this book examines the ways that middle-class Hindu communities are engaged actively in creating and maintaining their communities. Imagination as a social practice has been a crucial component of defining a transnational life in the moments between actual contact across borders, and the narratives community members tell are key components of communicating these social imaginaries. Narrative performances shape participants’ social realities in multiple ways: they define identities, they create connections between community members living on opposite sides of national borders, and they help create new homes amid increasing mobility. The narratives are religious and include both epic narratives, such as excerpts from the Rāmāyaṇ, and personal narratives with dharmic implications. The book argues that this Hindu community’s religious narrative performances significantly contribute to shaping their transnational lives. The analysis combines scholarly understandings of the ways that performances shape the contexts in which they are told, indigenous comprehension of the power that reciting certain narratives can have on those who hear them, and the theory that social imaginaries define new social realities through expressing the aspirations of communities.

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