Self in Motion: Transformative Practice in South Asian Traditions

September 2-3, 2025
Convenors: Daniela Bevilacqua, James Madaio, and Lucian Wong

The idea that the human being is constitutively called to transform in fundamental ways has been a ubiquitous feature of diverse cultures and civilizations. The domain commonly designated the ‘religious' has been a site wherein this transformative impulse has assumed some of its most pronounced and intricate expressions. This is certainly true of the South Asian context, where the drive to actualise purposive transformation in the inner and bodily life of the human subject has been an abiding feature across the subcontinent’s plural religious landscape. This is attested to not least by a teeming diversity of techniques for eff ecting radical self-change that pervade the subcontinent's textual, material-cultural, and ethnographic records. These techniques are invariably undergirded by, or give shape to, a corresponding plethora of conceptions of selfhood in transition—both thematised and tacit—that locate human life within a broader cosmos and movement toward a tradition-defi ned telos or highest good. In some contexts, this movement might be framed under the sign of healing, release, surrender, or a recovery of wholeness; elsewhere, as a form of transcendence, subsistence, or an unmaking of the self. At times, the overarching directionality of change might be marked by verticality or expansiveness, whether ontic or metaphoric; at others, by the inward disclosure of a stable inherency. For some, the pace of transition may be sudden, rupturous, even involuntary; for others, by contrast, incremental, habitual, almost quotidian. Irrespective of such variations—whether communal, historical and/or regional—this domain of transformative practice encodes some of the subcontinent’s most fundamental cultural imaginings and values pertaining to the human person and her place in existence.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of anthropologists, philosophers, and historians of religion, this workshop seeks to foreground this domain of transformative practice—historical and living, textual and embodied, ritual and aesthetic—as a critical point of entry for exploring and thinking with ideas about ‘deep selfhood’ in the South Asian religious context. The workshop will query a variety of areas related to self and practice, soteriology and sociality, which cut across Hindu, Sikh, Islamic, Jain, and Buddhist domains. It invites broader discussions about how the thematic foregrounding of transformative practice might productively inform the study of South Asian religions, and, correlatively, how attention to South Asian models of transformative movement might modulate cross-cultural theorisations of self-formation, transformation, and human flourishing. Participants are invited to address questions including, though by no means limited to:

● How are conceptions of self implicated in metaphors of movement? How do cartographies of change inform practice while also constructing the self they aim to transform?

● What kinds of temporalities are entailed in self-transformation? How do diff erent traditions situate the self in relation to varied paces of transformation?

● How might we thematise the impetuses and forces that propel change as well as their loci, whether inherent or beyond the self? How do these understandings shape self- conceptions in relation to varied notions of human fl ourishing?

● What can South Asian understandings tell us about the borders, porous boundaries, and liminality of subjectivity? What fundamentally constitutes selfhood and how is it fashioned, accessed, or changed through practice?

● In what ways does interaction with divine forces, agencies and presences—whether through ritual, possession, or embodiment—implicate models of ipseity and its relationship to otherness.

● How does a tradition’s understanding of the self-in-transition relate to the kind of transformative techniques it endorses? Do historical shifts in emphases or changes within this transformative regimen refl ect, or have any bearing upon, a tradition’s anthropology?

The workshop will lead to an edited volume or themed journal issue that will feature the respective papers delivered at the event.