Political deification—i.e. the transformation to and treatment of political leaders as divine beings—occurs in various religious and national contexts in Asia and has been understood as instances of messianism, custodianship, sacred kingship, martyrdom, pacification, and charismatic authority among others. These concepts travel, intersect, and imbue the different political systems in Asian countries. Yet they have been studied only as discrete political phenomena, not as related and overlapping concepts under an overarching theory that explains the deification of political leaders.
POLDEI is working on a transdisciplinary theory of political deification by using case studies from East, Inner, South-East, and South Asian countries to analyse popular cultural concepts that address the deification of political leaders. This transdisciplinary project uses innovative methods from anthropology, political science, history, film studies, visual/performance studies, in addition to the study of religion, to interpret the popular understanding of such religiopolitical phenomena.
The project POLDEI is developing a theory of political deification to understand how the legitimacy of political rule is grounded in concepts derived from religious worldviews. This theory built from Asia is not just for Asia. The theory in progress will provide us with the analytical tools and conceptual categories we need to decode the contemporary challenge of rising religious nationalisms not just in Asia but at the global level. From the perspective of the history of science, the project is testing the results of this radical act of relocating not just the ground of theory but also the geopolitical pattern of applicability.
The project demonstrates how political deification grounded in religious worldviews is a major factor in the legitimation of political authority. The theory of political deification which is based on the study of Asian multi-religious contexts of diverse polities—some of which are erstwhile colonies of European powers while others have complex inter-Asian power dynamics—is likely to be relevant not just to other parts of the global South but also to parts of the global North.
