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John R Freeman
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Visiting Assistant Professor
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Religion
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112 Carr Building
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Campus Box 90719
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Office Hours: Wednesdays and Fridays 12-1 and by appointment
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Homepage
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Research Summary
cultural anthropology, ethnohistory, indology, religion
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Research Description
My interdisciplinary training both as a field anthropologist and scholar of the vernacular and classical languages and literatures of India is reflected in my writings and research projects as a historical anthropologist of South Asian religions. In my principal ethnographic research, I have worked for many years on the lower-caste, spirit-possession cult of Teyyam in the state of Kerala. As a complement to this, and drawing more centrally on my textual training, I have developed a corresponding program of research into both the Brahmanical culture of Sanskrit learning and regimes of worship in the region’s high temple culture, and into the local, vernacular cultures of the martial and yeoman caste-strata. The goal has been to explore how these distinctive systems of knowledge and worship articulate in the wider region’s social and political history over long stretches of historical development. My broadest research agendum is thus to bring together the rich literary sources of South Asia with the perspectives and methods of social anthropology and history to develop an overview of south India’s religious culture that is ethnological in substance and historical in sweep.
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Education
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- PhD, Anthropology,,
- University of Pennsylvania,
- 1991
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- MA, South Asian Studies,,
- University of Pennsylvania,
- 1984
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Awards, Honors and Distinctions
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"Performing Spirit Possession and the New Media in Kerala.",
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German Research Council,
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Jan-Dec 2010
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Recent Publications
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- Rich Freeman.
- "“Caught in Translation: Ideologies of Literary Language in Kerala’s Maṇipravāḷam”."
- Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India.
- Ed. Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani.
- École Française d’Etrême Orient,
- 2013.
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- Rich Freeman.
- "Taste."
- Material Religion
- 7
- .1
- Oxford:
- Berg Publishers,
- (March, 2011)
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- (Special Issue: Key Terms in Material Religion)
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- Rich Freeman.
- "Pedagogy and Practice: The Meta-pragmatics of Tantric Rites in Kerala.."
- Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Vol. 1.
- Ed. Axel Michaels, and A. Mishra, eds..
- Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
- Fall, 2010.
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- Rich Freeman.
- "Untouchable Bodies of Knowledge in the Spirit Possession of Malabar."
- Images of the Body in India..
- Ed. Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf.
- New Delhi & London: Routledge,
- Fall, 2010.
- 125-155.
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- Rich Freeman.
- "The Performative Context of Nala in Late Medieval Kerala."
- Damayanti and Nala: The Many Lives of a Story..
- Ed. Susan Wadley.
- New Delhi: Chronicle Books,
- Fall, 2010.
- 187-241.
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View All Publications
