Tulasi Srinivas

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Tulasi Srinivas is an author, anthropologist, documentary film maker and scholar-activist. She is currently Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Srinivas studies the cultural and spatial politics of religion in urban India.

Contents

Early life

Srinivas is the younger daughter of the Indian social anthropologist M.N. Srinivas, the cultural geographer and cookbook author, Rukmini Srinivas. Her sister, Lakshmi Srinivas is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has stated that she found her father's death "unfair" as he was fit a few days prior and working until his death. [1]

Though born in Delhi due to her parents being academics at the university, Srinivas grew up in Bangalore, now Bengaluru, India. Most of her anthropological work is situated in Bengaluru, and she has spoken about her love for the city. [2]

She completed a BA in architecture from the B.M. Srinvasaiah college of Engineering in Bangalore University in 1989, an MA in urban planning and architecture from the University of Southern California in 1992, and a PhD in anthropology and sociology with a focus on religion at the University Professors Program of Boston University in 2002. Her advisors for her dissertation included Peter L. Berger, Nur Yalman and Michael M. J. Fischer. According to her own writings, her dissertation fieldwork advisor was her father M.N. Srinivas.

Career

Srinivas first taught at the Departments of Sociology and Religion at Boston University as a post-doctoral fellow in 2001-2002. She then was a Visiting Assistant professor in the department of Anthropology and Sociology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA, during which she also held a fellowship at the Center For the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School from 2002-2006. [3] In 2006, she was a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. She has been an assistant professor from 2006-2009, then associate professor from 2009-2014 [4] and professor since 2016 at the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. [5]

Srinivas first book on the global Sathya Sai Movement, titled Winged Faith: Rethinking Religious Pluralism and Cultural Globalization Through the Sathya Sai Movement was published in 2010 with Columbia University Press and became an "instant" classic. It was controversial among Sai devotees and former devotees. [6] [7]

Her next significant work titled The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder was published by Duke University Press in 2018, and it dealt with ritual creativity and wonder in Hindu temples in the neighborhood of Malleshwaram in Bengaluru. In it she argued that wonder, which had long been ignored by theorists of religion, was central to an understanding of successful ritual change/ creativity in temples in Bangalore. And that the pursuit of wonder allowed for "radical social hope." [8] [9]

Srinivas has an added research interest in Indian food and its global circulation. Her essay on the rise of Indian packaged food and Indian women's surreptitious use of it titled `As Mother made it': The Cosmopolitan Indian Family, `Authentic' Food And The Construction of Cultural Utopia' has become required reading in many food courses and commentary on food blogs. Srinivas co-edited with Krishnendu Ray the award-winning volume Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia published by University of California Press and by Aleph press in India. [10] [11] Srinivas has also written several expert articles on food and identity in Asia. [12]

Awards and fellowships

At Emerson College, Srinivas won the highest award for outstanding teaching, The Helaine and Stanley Miller teaching award, presented during the Golden Apple ceremony. [13]

Srinivas was a coeditor of the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion book series with Palgrave Macmillan, and she serves on the boards of several academic journals and institutions. During 2012-2017 she was part of the 100 individuals on the for the World Economic Forum where she focused on the moral question of financial and gender equity. Subsequently, she has written articles on financial equity and ethics for the World Economic Forum blog. [14]

Selected publications

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References

  1. ↑ Bearer, Barry. "M. N. Srinivas Is Dead at 83; Studied India's Caste System". The New York Times.
  2. ↑ "Worlds of Wonder". Harvard University.
  3. ↑ "Tulasi Srinivas". Harvard University.
  4. ↑ "Tulasi Srinivas". Georgetown University.
  5. ↑ "Tulasi Srinivas". Emerson College.
  6. ↑ Huffer, Amanda (2011). "Review of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement". The Journal of Asian Studies. 70 (3): 894–896. doi:10.1017/S0021911811001501. ISSN   0021-9118. JSTOR   41302451.
  7. ↑ LAHIRI, SMITA (2012). "Review of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement". American Ethnologist. 39 (2): 465–467. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01374_22.x. ISSN   0094-0496. JSTOR   23250853.
  8. ↑ Sethi, Manisha (1 October 2019). "Book Review: Tulasi Srinivas. 2018. The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder". Contributions to Indian Sociology. 53 (3): 441–443. doi:10.1177/0069966719860336. ISSN   0069-9667. S2CID   203454917.
  9. ↑ "THE COW IN THE ELEVATOR: An Anthropology of Wonder | By Tulasi Srinivas". Pacific Affairs. 14 January 2019.
  10. ↑ Dasgupta, Kaushik. "Food For Thought Curried Cultures". The Indian Express.
  11. ↑ "Book Review: Curried Cultures by Krishnendu Ray, Tulasi Srinivas". New Asian Writing. 20 November 2017.
  12. ↑ Srinivas, Tulasi. "Exploring Indian Culture through Food". The Association for Asian Studies.
  13. ↑ "Helaine and Stanley Miller Award for Outstanding Teaching". Academic Affairs, Emerson College. Emerson College.
  14. ↑ "What's the link between money and happiness?". World Economic Forum.
  15. ↑ Dunn, Laura M. (2020). "Review of The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder". Asian Ethnology. 79 (1): 182–184. ISSN   1882-6865. JSTOR   26929497.
  16. ↑ Venkatesan, Soumhya (17 June 2020). "The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder by Tulasi Srinivas (review)". Anthropological Quarterly. 93 (1): 1677–1681. doi:10.1353/anq.2020.0013. ISSN   1534-1518.
  17. ↑ Kent, Alexandra (2011). "Review of Winged faith: rethinking globalization and religious pluralism through the Sathya Sai movement". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 17 (2): 428–429. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01698_28.x. ISSN   1359-0987. JSTOR   23011406.
  18. ↑ "CURRIED CULTURES: GLOBALIZATION, FOOD AND SOUTH ASIA, edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. 316 pp". Food and Foodways. 23 (1–2): 134–137. 3 April 2015. doi:10.1080/07409710.2015.1030978. ISSN   0740-9710. S2CID   216644499.
  19. ↑ "India's Goddesses of Contagion Provide Protection in the Pandemic". Henry Luce Foundation.
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