Abstract This article examines three boar figures in South Asian religious traditions: Varāha in the early Skandapurāṇa , Panjurli Daiva in Tulu Bhūtakola traditions, and Kompaṉ in the Tamil oral epic Aṇṇanmār Katai. These figures come from different regions, languages, and historical contexts, but each shows how humans imagine bonds with animals, spirits, and deities. I argue that these stories use boar figures to think beyond human families. Varāha becomes attached to his son Vṛka; Panjurli’s origin story turns on fosterage and care; and Vīrataṅkāḷ’s bond with Kompaṉ reveals an intimate relation between a woman and a boar. Together, these examples show that relatedness can include affection, care, obligation, as well as conflict, hierarchy, and loss. By reading Sanskrit, Tulu, and Tamil sources together, this article offers a comparative account of more-than-human kinship in South Asian religions.
Abstract This special double issue of Numen advances the study of “more-than-human religion” by bringing together scholarship on religious traditions across Asia and the Americas that emphasize human-nonhuman entanglements. Rather than treating these traditions as objects of study, the seven articles approach them as sites of theorizing about the more-than-human that unsettle established paradigms. The editorial introduction develops four lines of inquiry that emerge across the collection. First, it considers how scholars might theorize from religion rather than only about it by taking vernacular and Indigenous concepts as sites of theoretical insight. Second, it asks how a postsecular religious studies might rethink inherited categories that have authorized some more-than-human agencies while dismissing others as superstition, fetishism, or idolatry. Third, it explores how more-than-human religion offers ecological modes of thought grounded in kinship, reciprocity, and shared world-making across human and nonhuman forms of life. Finally, it examines how museums, heritage institutions, and vernacular practices of preservation mediate and sometimes transform the agencies of more-than-human beings and things.
Abstract This article explores the relationship of more-than-human religion to notions of humanism and transcendence in early modern Tibet. It argues for understanding the human, more-than-human, and transcendent as potentially co-constitutive. It seeks to illuminate this possibility by considering the metaphysical assumptions undergirding critical turns to the more-than-human and contrasting two different notions of transcendence: one associated with Christian monotheism in particular and post-Axial religions in general, linked historically and philosophically to narratives of Western anthropocentrism; the other pertaining to the tantric Buddhist idea of the absolute as a primordially perfected basis, common to Tibet’s major practice traditions. It concludes that the study of more-than-human religion can benefit from broadening our notion of transcendence and accordingly rethinking the humanistic concepts of analysis typically affiliated with a Western dualistic worldview in new terms.
Abstract In sixteenth-century New Spain, descendants of pre-Hispanic nobility featured native flora in histories of the ancestral migrations that led to the foundation of their city-states. The multispecies interactions envisioned in these chronicles convey the legacy of relations between Mesoamericans and agave ( Agave spp.), succulent plants with whom people have coevolved and coordinated their ability to survive. This study of colonial Mexican manuscripts parses how community narratives forge a visuality of maguey as an ecologically embedded form of identity and inheritance. I argue that the legitimacy of Nahua constituencies drew from the relationality of their forebears with a sacred wilderness of thorns that evoked their sacrifices and the legacy of their rise to power. Interweaving heterogenous figures into presentations of time and place, the Nahua recodified the legacies of their mutualism with agave, creating an imaginary that has long served as a basis for constructing Indigenous, Mexican, and botanical identity.
Abstract The agentive features of figurative sculpture appear in iconoclastic acts of destruction taken against them. Such acts reveal an ambivalence in iconoclasts’ relationships with these artworks: a simultaneous attraction to their near-human quality, which allows sculptures to serve as ritual substitutes for live persons – as scapegoats – and a repulsion to the sculptures that motivates the attack. Paradoxically, iconoclastic attacks help to produce artworks as sacred – as incarnational, presence-bearing things. To show this, I consider the case of the 1970 bombing of Rodin’s The Thinker in Cleveland as an act of ritual sacrifice; a sculpture “killed” as though it were a condemned person. Instead of destroying it, though, the iconoclasts animated it. The cast of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Thinker now pulses with life in a way unlike any other version. Damaged by the blast, wrenched apart, its base a jagged plume, The Thinker ’s ripped legs and hollowed torso open now to a distinct kind of near-human agency, as martyr.
