Maritime Goddesses: Transnational Connections, Blue Environments, and Ritual Care in East- and Southeast Asia

Objective

“Maritime Goddesses: Transnational Connections, Blue Environments, and Ritual Care in East- and Southeast Asia” (MARGO) studies some of the most popular deities in the world and the ways in which people relate to them: Guanyin, Mazu, Benzaiten, and several other goddesses to whom people pray for protection and support. These goddesses are often associated with bodies of water (seas, oceans, rivers, and deltas). They can move, change shape, and transcend political and ontological boundaries. Although these goddesses are central to the ritual lives of billions of people, there has been little research on the ways in which people relate to them in everyday life. MARGO offers a large-scale comparative, transnational, and multidisciplinary approach to goddess worship in Asia, focusing not on a single deity or tradition but comparing different practices across time and space. Its overarching questions are: 1) How have people in East and Southeast Asian places related to their goddesses in everyday life; 2) How do these goddesses relate to the larger maritime and riverine environments in which they are embedded; and 3) How have they travelled and changed in response to changes in their devotees’ lives and environments? MARGO thus proposes a radically different approach to the study of lived religion in Asia from what has been common in the academic literature, which will lead to important conceptual and theoretical interventions. The project has three overarching objectives: 1) Challenge and overcome problematic classification models in the study of Asian religions, instead furthering the comparative, transnational study of worship traditions; 2) Continue the work of bridging the study of religion and the environmental humanities, especially with regard to the emerging field of the blue humanities; and 3) Develop a new theory of ritual, investigating rituals as affective and embodied care practices that mediate relationships between humans and natural environments.