This volume seeks to chart and elucidate the diverse relationships between the religious and secular spheres in regions of Asia that were significantly influenced – sometimes even dominated – by Buddhist discourses, ideas, and institutions. These regions include South Asia (India, Sri Lanka), East and Southeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), Inner Asia (Buryatia, Mongolia, Tibet), and the Himalayan region (Bhutan). These regions were connected by communicative networks long before the global modern age. They constituted an intricately entangled discursive sphere, shaped by the cross-regional spread of concepts and ideas from Buddhism and, in East Asia, Confucianism. The volume sheds light on the prehistory and development of culturally specific forms of secularity, and related concepts, in Asia.

This groundbreaking study focuses on the premodern capital of the Spiti Valley, Dangkhar, “perched on its crag, overlooking the gigantic valley of many-hued strata” in the words of Rudyard Kipling. From its incorporation into the Tibetan Empire in the 7th century until its annexation by British India in 1846, the Spiti Valley occupied a peripheral yet significant position on the map of South Asia. During this time, the Dangkhar settlement emerged as the political centre of this border valley.

Yannick Laurent draws on extensive fieldwork and historical archives to re-examine the constitutive elements of this site from its territory to its religious and political institutions. Over time, the Dangkhar settlement came to be referred to as ‘royal seat’ or ‘capital’ (rgyal sa) of Spiti. Sitting astride some of the most important trade and communication routes of the Western Himalayas, the Spiti Valley played a major role in the diffusion of ideas and the transfer of goods within the Indo-Tibetan border regions. In tracing both local and trans-regional patterns of continuity and change, this study contributes to refining a periodisation scheme which illuminates the various political, religious, and economic interactions which have shaped the history of the Western Himalayas.

Laurent’s investigation into the imperilled cultural heritage site of Dangkhar lays the foundations for the most detailed historical overview of Spiti to date.

Der Sammelband geht der Frage nach, ob die die Unterscheidung zwischen Religiösem und Säkularem – d. h. Säkularität – wirklich eine Eigenheit der westlichen Moderne ist, oder ob es auch in vormodernen Gesellschaften Asiens vergleichbare Unterscheidungen gibt. Die einzelnen Beiträge verdeutlichen, dass in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte analoge binäre Unterscheidungen in verschiedenen kulturspezifischen Varianten nachweisbar sind. Diese wirken bis heute nach und begründen eine globale Vielfalt von Säkularitäten, die nicht einfach als Varianten eines europäischen Modells betrachtet werden können.

This contribution outlines the project of a global history of religion that examines the historical formations and epistemic structures in non-European regions prior to the encounter with Europeans just as much as the current entanglements of the global discourse on religion. Based on a case study of the encounter between Tibetans and Catholic missionaries in 18th century Lhasa, three important aspects in the project of a global history of religion will be discussed: comparison, both at the subject level and as a scholarly method; the practice of translation; and finally the genealogical tracing of taxonomic orders in non-European regions beyond colonial orders. In addition, a suggestion is offered to expand our analytical repertoire to include non-European worlds of experience in a conceptual-historical approach.

Read here the research report of Dr. Amy Heller's project "Birds and Deer in Tibet and the Himalayas: from Ancient Tibetan rituals and archaeology to Sustainable Development" here. The project was part of a larger investigation into the cultural significance of birds and deer from pre-history to present day among populations of the
Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, knowledge about Siberia inspired Catherine II to create the main character of one of her comedies, The Siberian Shaman. Taking Foucault’s dispositif-concept as its theoretical premise, the present paper discusses the historical context in which The Siberian Shaman was written, deconstructs the identity of the comedy’s main character, and explores the socio-political purposes for which the comedy was written. By utilising the perspective of entangled history of religions and the methodology of historical discourse analysis, this paper shows that the comedy’s alleged “shamanic” content and “anti-shamanic” purpose cannot be taken for granted. Rather, the discourse in The Siberian Shaman should be read as Catherine II’s own engagement with the themes of unreason and madness within the philosophical, socio-political and religious context of the period.

The Book Collective Intentionality and the Study of Religion: Social Ontology and Empirical Research by Andrea Rota is now available electronically as an Open Access publication.

Das erste Sonderheft der Zeitschrift AЯGOS: Perspektiven in der Religionswissenschaft zum Thema “Religion und Ökologie” ist online verfügbar: https://www.journal-argos.org/issue/archive. Herausgegeben von Anja Kirsch, Oliver Krüger, Christophe Monnot und Andrea Rota.

Das Buch "Azan on the Moon", das aus der Dissertation entstand, die Till Mostowlansky am Institut für Religionswissenschaft 2013 eingereicht hat, wurde als eines von sieben "artworks" ausgewählt, die 30 Jahre Tajikistan exemplarisch illustrieren.

The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates in the humanities and social sciences ever since. Imported into anthropology in the 1960s, etic came to stand for ambitions to establish an objective, scientific approach to the study of culture, whereas emic refers to the goal of grasping the world according to one’s interlocutors’ particular points of view. While the distinction lost traction as an analytical instrument in anthropology in the 1990s, emic and etic have become concepts used by various other disciplines and subfields in the humanities and social sciences. In these contexts, they continue to be used to address a range of different epistemological and methodological issues, such as the relationship between researcher and research subject or the question of how to legitimately interpret social practices. For this reason, the emic/etic distinction remains relevant. It draws attention to fundamental differences in the way scholars and students of various disciplines approach and discuss research, data, and comparison.

Employing historical, ethnographic and archaeological sources, this monograph explores
the human and material agents of conflict and war on the Tibetan Plateau. The cultural
and religious foundations of combat and other bellicose traditions are surveyed through
Tibetan textual and anthropological evidence, establishing an interpretative framework
for analyzing the significance of the ancient rock art, monuments and artefacts also
featured in this work. Set against such archaeological and artistic records, the investigation
of martial ideas, practices and technologies permits the postulation of longstanding links
in the conception and conduct of warfare in Tibet.

This archaeological and art-historical study is woven around rock art and ancient metallic articles attributed to Tibet. The silver bowls, gold finial, and copper alloy spouted jars and trapezoidal plaques featured are assigned to the Iron Age and Protohistoric period. These rare objects are adorned with zoomorphic subjects mimicking those found in rock art and embody an artistic zeitgeist widely diffused in Central Eurasia in Late Prehistory. Diverse sources of inspiration and technological capability are revealed in these objects and rock art, shedding light on their transcultural dimension. The archaeological and aesthetic materials in this work prefigure the Tibetan cosmopolitanism of early historic times promoted through the spread of Buddhist ideas, art and craft from abroad. The metallic articles and petroglyphs of this study are markers of relationships between Tibet and her neighbours. These transactions enabled a fusion of Tibetan innovation and foreign inventiveness, a synthesis of disparate ideas, aesthetics and technologies in the objects and rock art presented.

Drawn and Written in Stone explores the religious history of the highest part of the Tibetan Plateau through its rock art and inscriptions. It is focused on facsimiles of ritual and ceremonial monuments carved and painted on stone surfaces and rock inscriptions in the Tibetan language, vital archaeological and historical materials for appraising the development of religion in Tibet, ca. 100 BCE to 1400 CE. By probing the complexion of figures and letters in stone, this work considers how early cult traditions contributed to the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism and a rival faith known as Yungdrung Bon. Outside of the Indian cultural context, relatively little has been written about the historical antecedents of these popular Tibetan religions for a want of sources. This monograph helps remedy this large gap in Tibetan studies by drawing upon the author’s surveys of rock art and rock inscriptions conducted in upmost Tibet between 1995 and 2013.

“Visualizing the non-Buddhist Other: A Historical Analysis of the Shambhala Myth in Mongolia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, in: Cross-Currents. East Asian History and Culture Review: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 31, 32-57.

Andrea Rota, Oliver Krüger (eds.) - “The Dynamics of Religion, Media, and Community”, Special Issue der Fachzeitschrift Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, Volume 14 (2019).

La religion à l'école. Négociations autour de la présence publique des communautés religieuses.

Der Begriff der »Transzendenzerfahrung« ist in der Religionsforschung stark umkämpft und bedarf einer Deutung ohne religiöse Wertung. Die sprachphilosophische Position der Psychoanalyse ermöglicht einen neuen interdisziplinären Zugang: Janina M. Hofer zieht eine auf die Psychoanalyse Lacans adaptierte Version der Grounded Theory nach Kelle und Kluge heran, um Schilderungen außergewöhnlicher Erfahrungen zu untersuchen.

Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism

First study dealing with near-death experiences as a decisive element of modern religious discourse. Demonstrates how important elements such as the "panoramic life review," "tunnel experience," or "out-of-body experience" were combined with traditional elements of Christian deathbed narratives. Provides previously undiscovered accounts of near-death experiences from 1580-1975

This work explores extraordinary pre-Buddhist silver, gold and bronze objects hitherto unknown to scholars and collectors. It engages in much detective work across the vast expanses of the Eurasian continent to hunt down the sources of inspiration and technical know-how for these precious articles. In the course of this investigation many different cultures and peoples and their relationships with Tibetans before the Buddhist era are introduced. This first cosmopolitan era on the Plateau in the Iron Age was every bit as profound and colorful as the Buddhist variety that followed much later.