Oxford University Press Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and their Narrative Performances

Imagining Religious Communities tells the story of the Gupta family through the personal and religious narratives they tell as they create and maintain their extended family and community across national borders. Based on ethnographic research, the book demonstrates the ways that transnational communities are involved in shaping their experiences through narrative performances. Jennifer B. Saunders demonstrates that 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 amidst increasing mobility. The narratives are religious and include epic narratives such as excerpts from the Ramayana as well as personal narratives with dharmic implications. Saunders' analysis combines scholarly understandings of the ways in which 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. Imagining Religious Communities argues that this Hindu community's religious narrative performances significantly contribute to shaping their transnational lives. Review Imagining Religious Communties is a pioneering study of how some members of the first generation of Hindu immigrants to the United States re-invented their ritual traditions in order to develop new religious communities for themselves and their neighbors. By enabling these now-aging immigrants to speak for themselves, Jennifer Saunders provides a model for how the discipline of Religous Studies can help us understand the important place religion has in defining community. ― Paul Younger, author of New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji and East Africa In the study of transnational flows, the grand survey predominates. What Saunders exquisitely demonstrates in this book is the overlooked value of attending closely to how global social dynamics manifest themselves in and are shaped by the narrative performances of specific individuals and their extended family networks. Through perceptive, multi-sited, ethnographic description, Saunders excavates the role that religion ― itself always in a state of becoming ― plays in processes of transnational cultural identify formation. ― Chad Bauman, author of Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India An intimate study of religion-infused global networks, where micro-analyses give way to macro-perspectives. Working closely with a single family whose members are spread across the planet, Saunders deftly demonstrates how personal narratives create social realities that reflect and connect disparate worlds. This book brings the transnational down to earth, with real people giving it shape, one family and one story at a time. ― Corinne Dempsey, author of The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York: Breaking Convention and Making Home at a North American Hindu Temple About the Author Jennifer B. Saunders is an independent scholar living in Stamford, CT. She has taught in a number of colleges and universities in the Southeast, Midwest, and Northeast. Her research interests include the transmission of Hindu devotional songs among middle class women in India and beyond specifically and religion and migration generally. She has published articles on transnational Hinduism in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including Religion Compass and Nova Religio. She is co-founder of the American Academy of Religion's Religion and Migration Group and a co-editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Religion and Global Migration series.