CoronAsur
Asian Religions in the Covidian Age
By the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus had fully entered our everyday vocabulary and our lives, religious communities and places of worship around the world were already undergoing profound changes. In Asian and Asian diaspora communities, diverse cultural tropes, beliefs, and artifacts were mobilized to make sense of Covid, including a repertoire of gods and demons like Coronasur, the virus depicted with the horns and fangs of a traditional Hindu demon. Various kinds of knowledge were invoked: theologies, indigenous medicines, and biomedical narratives, as well as ethical values and nationalist sentiments. CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age follows the documentation and analysis of the abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic to understand current and future pandemic times, while revealing further avenues for research on religion that have opened up in the Covidian age.
Developed in tandem with the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19, this volume is a “phygital” publication, a work grounded in empirical roots as well as digitally born communication. It comprises thirty-eight essays and dozens of videos and other online content that examine Asian religious communities—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, and Christian as well as popular/folk and new religious movements, or NRMs—in terms of the changes brought on by and the ritual responses to the Covid pandemic.
Studying religious narratives, practices, and changes in the Covidian age adds to our understanding of not only the specific groups in which they are situated, but also the coronavirus itself, its disputed etiologies and culturally contextualized exegeses. CoronAsur offers a comprehensive and timely discussion of Covidian transformations in religious communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and political economies, documenting how religious practices and discourses have co-produced the meanings of the pandemic.
Contributors:
Fatema Aarshe,
Yasmeen Arif,
Indira Arumugam,
Swayam Bagaria,
Raka Banerjee,
Malini Bhattacharjee,
Md. Khaled Bin Oli Bhuiyan,
Chang Hsun,
Jack Meng-Tat Chia,
Terence Chong,
Ankana Das,
Deepsikha Dasgupta,
Nia Deliana,
Beverly Anne Devakishen,
Mariano Errichiello,
Amelia Fauzia,
Nalika Gajaweera,
Kanchana Dodan Godage,
Daniel P.S. Goh,
Emily Zoe Hertzman,
Siti Zubaidah Ismail,
Nurul Fadiah Johari,
Sinah Theres Kloß,
Natalie Lang,
Erica M. Larson,
Lei Ting,
Alvin Eng Hui Lim,
Lim Peng Chew,
Marianna Lis,
Carola E. Lorea,
Neena Mahadev,
Muhammad Lutfi Bin Othman,
Mukul Pandey,
Dishani Roy,
Louie Jon A. Sánchez,
Shen Yeh-Ying,
Yuki Shiozaki,
Show Ying Ruo,
Esmond Chuah Meng Soh,
Tran Thi Thuy Binh,
Vo Duy Thanh,
Dean Wang,
Catherine West,
Lynn Wong,
Faizah Zakaria,
Saymon Zakaria,
Philipp Zehmisch,
Zhao Yuanhao, and
Yijiang Zhong.
Table of Contents
Resources
Resource Collections
Essay 1 - Reshaping Traditional Culture in Bangladesh
CollectionEssay 2 - Monster for Covid Struggle
CollectionEssay 3 - “Three Cs” and the Three Mysteries
CollectionEssay 4 - New Diseases, Old Deities
CollectionEssay 5 - Turmeric and Neem
CollectionEssay 6 - Saint Corona, Coronasur, and Corona Devi
CollectionEssay 7 - Why Was Thousand-Hand Guanyin Late for the Meeting?
CollectionEssay 8 - Cosmologies, Cartoons, Commentaries
CollectionEssay 9 - Puppets Wearing Masks
CollectionEssay 10 - Catholic Televisuality in the Time of Pandemic
CollectionEssay 11 - Burden Us Not with That Which We Have No Ability to Bear
CollectionEssay 12 - Cyber Dharma
CollectionEssay 13 - Ritual Adaptations on Telok Ayer
CollectionEssay 14 - Parsis and Ritual Innovation
CollectionEssay 15 - We Knew It!
CollectionEssay 16 - A Bread and Wine Issue
CollectionEssay 17 - Touchless Technology, Untouchability, and the COVID-19 Pandemic
CollectionEssay 18 - The Sonic and the Somatic
CollectionEssay 19 - De-sensorializing and Disembodying Chinese Religions in Singapore amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
CollectionEssay 20 - Gods Have Eyes
CollectionEssay 22 - #Minimosque
CollectionEssay 24 - To Go or Not to Go?
CollectionEssay 25 - COVID-19 and Dao Mau's Ritual Practitioners
CollectionEssay 26 - Sonic Fields of Protection in Sri Lanka's COVID-19 Pandemic
CollectionEssay 28 - Serving the Other during the Pandemic
CollectionEssay 30 - Miracle Cure for COVID-19 in Sri Lanka
CollectionEssay 31 - COVID-19 and the Rohingyas
CollectionEssay 32 - Delivering from Suffering in the Final Era
CollectionEssay 33 - The Performance of Hoa Hao Buddhists' Charity Kitchens in Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic in Vietnam
CollectionEssay 34 - The Cap Go Meh That Never Happened
CollectionEssay 35 - The Pandemic and Its Effect on the Performance of Hajj Pilgrimage in Malaysia
CollectionEssay 36 - Buddhist Temples as Shelters for Vietnamese Migrants in Japan
CollectionEssay 37 - Who Owns the Temple Gold?
CollectionEssay 38 - COVID-19 and Shifting Practices of Islamic Charity
CollectionEpilogue
Collection
Single Resources
Metadata
- restrictions
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- edition1
- isbn9780824894948
- publisherUniversity of Hawai‘i Press
- publisher placeHonolulu
- rights© 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press
- rights holderUniversity of Hawai‘i Press
- rights territoryWorldwide