Description du projet
Les puranas en tant que discours mythique unificateur
Les puranas font partie des traditions scripturales les plus importantes de l’hindouisme. Se présentant sous diverses formes, ils ont pour thème principal les pouvoirs et les œuvres des dieux. Leur enregistrement et leur diffusion ont commencé au cours du premier millénaire de notre ère et ils ont joué depuis un rôle central dans le développement culturel de l’Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est. Cependant, étant donné l’anonymat des compositeurs et des transmetteurs puraniques, nous ne savons que très peu de choses sur l’ancrage historique de ce genre essentiel de la littérature sanskrite. Le projet PURANA, financé par le CER, introduit le concept d’un «écoumène puranique» établi et uni par les puranas en tant que discours mythique. PURANA retracera la composition, la transmission, la traduction et l’action des puranas à travers le temps et l’espace, en identifiant les différents acteurs, publics et contextes géographiques.
Objectif
The Puranas (Primordial Texts) constitute the most voluminous and enduring genre of Sanskrit literature. These anonymous texts narrate the mythic cycles associated with the major deities of Hinduism (Visnu, Siva, Brahma, the Goddess, etc.). The Puranas have also been integral to processes of ‘place-making’ by creating maps of geography and celebrating the salvific potential of sacred sites in myths that imbue the landscape with divine agency. While many important Puranas were first recorded and circulated in the first millennium CE—a time of significant social change marked by the flourishing of regional devotional movements and innovations of temple and image-centered religious practices— the genre has remained a living tradition through the colonial period until the present day. Despite the tradition’s centrality for cultural production in South Asia, we know very little about their historical embeddedness, as the Puranic composers and transmitters—in accordance with the anonymity characteristic of the genre—disguised their own historicity behind claims of ‘primordiality’ and divinely inspired teachings. More than just a body of literature, the Puranas are a dynamic mythical discourse. PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Puranas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts—from Hindu scribes and Persian poets to Portuguese Jesuits and Khmer rulers. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Puranas’ mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis—establishing what we call a ‘Puranic Ecumene’: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
2311 EZ Leiden
Pays-Bas