http://hdl.handle.net/10071/563 2026-04-13T08:24:03Z http://hdl.handle.net/10071/36738 Título próprio: Frictions, entanglements and reconfigurations: Religion and heritage in global South Asia Autoria: Lazzaretti, V.; Mapril, J.; Lourenço, I. Resumo: This article introduces the thematic section Heritage and Religion in South Asia and its Diasporas and proposes a new framework for analysing the relationship between religion and heritage. While previous scholarship has often approached this nexus in terms of similarities or conflicts, the article argues that global South Asia offers a productive ground for rethinking the complex ways in which religion and heritage interact and shape each other both discursively and materially. Drawing on contributions from across the thematic section, it moves beyond the established distinction between the 'heritagisation of the sacred' and the 'sacralisation of heritage'. Instead, it proposes a new analytical framework centred on friction, entanglement and reconfiguration—three distinct but overlapping modalities through which religion and heritage interact on the ground. Through examples from South Asia and its diasporas, the article shows how heritage discourses are appropriated, contested and reworked by diverse actors, from state institutions to local religious communities and migrants. By foregrounding uneven power relations and transnational circulations of beliefs, memories and objects, it positions South Asia as a generative site for theorising the dynamic cross-fertilisation of religion and heritage in contemporary societies. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10071/36528 Título próprio: The gender of the nation: Allegoric femininity and women’s status in Bengal and Goa Autoria: Fruzzetti, L.; Perez, R. M. Resumo: This joint paper is the outcome of collaborative efforts through joint teaching and joint publication. Our central aim is to compare the nationalist period in India – when gender was endorsed both as an ideal and an ideological program, to the post-independence era. Our comparative analysis tries to understand the status and social role of women after Indian independence, when they were drawn into the nationalist movement through their participation in the mission of cleansing the earth-land, the mother land. Adopting an anthropological and historical approach to women in Bengal and Goa, we are theoretically concerned with postcolonial gender construction, and the meaning of “woman” within contemporary national constructs of the personhood. 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10071/36390 Título próprio: The afterlives of repatriation: Heritage, emancipation and violence in Hindu nationalist India Autoria: Lazzaretti, V. Resumo: In 2021, a statuette of Hindu goddess Annapurna was taken from a Canadian museum to India as an arguably restorative, if not emancipatory, and decolonial achievement for a postcolonial nation. The statuette was enshrined at the Kashi Vishvanath temple in Banaras (Varanasi), a few metres from the Gyanvapi mosque – a longstanding target of Hindu nationalist campaigns for the mukti (liberation or emancipation) of supposedly originally Hindu sites. This article brings together Annapurna and the Gyanvapi mosque as two sides of the same story about heritage, emancipation and violence in Hindu nationalist India, and proposes an alternative methodological approach to the under-explored afterlives of repatriation. By combining longitudinal ethnographic research in the neighbourhood where Annapurna was enshrined with analysis of media and legal discourses, it teases out under-explored understandings that returned objects and repatriation itself afford in their post-repatriation locality – both in local responses and broader discussions around heritage restitution. I argue that repatriation cases such as that of Annapurna feed into a Hindu nationalist discursive ecology in which notions of emancipation, decolonisation and restitution are mobilised for majoritarian agendas: as exemplified by controversies around the Gyanvapi mosque, these notions increasingly underpin violent claims against minorities and their heritage. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10071/35809 Título próprio: Political struggles over the logic of human needs quantification: Negotiating capitalist welfare futures Autoria: Matos, P. A. de. Resumo: This article draws on historical and ethnographic research conducted in Portugal to examine how the logic of human needs quantification serves as a central point of political struggle among various social actors, each driven by conflicting political motivations, moral commitments, and valuation debates during periods of crisis. It argues that this logic should be understood as a site of struggle where different actors delineate the material, moral, and political boundaries that shape the fulfillment of basic needs, the allocation of resources, and the organization and management of social hierarchies regarding needs and their carriers. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that political struggles over the logic of human needs quantification during each crisis have been crucial in negotiating capitalist welfare futures. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z