Research Group

[Research Group] Dynamics of Culture and Society in South Asia

• Unit 1: Social Resilience in South Asia
• Unit 2: South Asian “Cultural Gyre”

Unit 1: Social Resilience in South Asia

Even though trans- and intra-national migration both from and in South Asia has remarkably increased under globalization and rapid economic growth, people's traditional social bond seems to have been strongly maintained. Namely, people's agency has been actively exerted against rapid social change, utilizing their social network based on traditional resource such as caste and/or common regionality. Unit 1 defines this phenomena as south Asian ‘social resilience’, and tries to extract its features and examine its strength mainly by socio-cultural anthropological research on south Asian people's trans- and intra-national movement.

Unit 2: South Asian “Cultural Gyre”

Unit 2 develops our centre's first term's research on south Asian “cultural gyre”, which is defined as the cultural phenomena of which things, information and value originated from South Asia circulate globally, interact with other regions' culture, transform their nature after such interaction, and come back to South Asia to change its socio-cultural conditions. In the second term, individual “cultural gyre” phenomenon including religious ones will be investigated. We will also pursue features of this phenomena broadening our views both temporarily and geographically. Through that investigation, we try to elucidate characteristics of south Asian civilization and its dynamics through the time.