Tantra, Religious Studies, Methodology and the Practitioner-Scholar Turn with Sundari Johansen

In this podcast we meet CIIS faculty member Sundari Johansen and speak about how her academic background in religious studies informs the critical perspective and frameworks she brings into her course on Hindu Tantra. We discuss research as deep listening and self-transformation, and get into the problems of traditional western ethnographic methodologies based upon the distinction between the insider and outsider. Sundari also shares why she was lead to invert the scholar-practitioner model into the practitioner-scholar model as a way of problematizing and making productive the entangledness of subjective engagement in the subject of one’s study. We end by taking a deep dive into her paper titled, (In)conspicuous Consumption: Food, the Child Body, and Inversion of Hard-Core Rituals in Hindu Tantras.

Sundari Johansen Hurwitt, PhD, specializes in gender, the body, ritual, power, and secrecy in religion. While her interest in these themes encompasses a variety of religious traditions, her research work currently focuses on ritual studies in South Asia, especially Hinduism, Śāktism (goddess-focused Hindu traditions) and Tantra in India. A practitioner and scholar, Dr. Johansen comparatively explores representations of the young female in the Tantric literature of Bengal and the Northeast as well as in the living Tantric traditions of Northeast India, using extensive textual research and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. 

Her dissertation, “The Voracious Virgin: The Concept and Worship of the Kumārī in Kaula Tantrism” (CIIS, 2019) is the first comprehensive study of the kumārī (pre-menarche virgin girls worshipped as goddesses) in India. She is particularly interested in representations of gender and the body in late medieval and early modern Tantric texts, the development of Tantrism in Bengal and the northeast, and in continuities and differences between textual and modern living traditions. Her work is deeply rooted in post-colonial and decolonial, transnational, feminist, and integrative philosophies, as well as exploration of non-Western philosophical and theoretical traditions. Dr. Johansen is a strong proponent of integral feminist pedagogies and research methods and interested in furthering the development of immersive, cooperative, and collaborative educational models in online education.

During her dissertation fieldwork in Assam, Dr. Johansen assisted in the development of a library and digital archive with the Foundation for History and Heritage Studies at Kāmākhyā Dhām in Guwahati, which was established to preserve endangered manuscripts and other documentation from the local community at the Kāmākhyā temple complex. Part of this work included video and audio documentation of local women’s devotional music, as well as assistance with digital restoration of archival materials. Dr. Johansen received an MA and PhD in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her research has received support from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

The EWP Podcast credits

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• Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP Core Faculty) and Jonathan Kay (PhD candidate)
• Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay
• Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay
• Introduction music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala
• Music at the end of the episode: Rise from Justin Gray’s Synthesis
• Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra