South Asia Shared Sacred Sites (I-Share)

The website aims at displaying key ethnographic material and will centralise the research outputs of the ANR-funded research project (2018-2021) titled: The Indian Subcontinent’s Shared Sacred Sites. The ANR project ambitions to study sacred sites shared by different religious communities in South Asia.

First, the project will question the impact of sites sharing on the fabric of plural societies in times of rising religious and ethnic nationalisms. Second, the focus on shared sacred sites will lead the 17 research members (as of January 2018) to explore the articulation between religious interactions and the politics of belonging, as the existence of such shared spaces questions the boundaries between groups and between religions. As field research lies at the heart of the project, the website will display primary material (text, photos, videos, audio recordings) collected from the 17 field sites under scrutiny (2 in Pakistan, 9 in India, 2 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh, 2 in Mauritius, 1 in Sri Lanka).

Additionally, the website will display relevant information about the project; it will include the list of team members, a map displaying the various field sites, new publications related to the project, reviews, seminars and conferences organised as well as an exhaustive research bibliography. The website ambitions to attract a wide readership; it will engage with both researchers and students in various social science fields (sociology of religions, South Asian studies, political sciences, anthropology) and concerned citizens interested in the contemporary transformations of South Asian societies.