Project description
A closer look at the global significance of mantras
Over a billion people today, including Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh minorities, and yoga practitioners, use mantras – sacred utterances, formulas, or syllables – for the purposes of ritual, prayer, contemplation, and wellness. However, the profound cultural and spiritual significance of mantas remains largely unexplored. Existing research often focuses narrowly on elite Sanskrit texts, missing the broader, multisensory experiences they encompass. Their diverse manifestations (from ancient manuscripts to modern digital forms) are often overlooked in academic study. In this context, the ERC-funded MANTRAMS project will produce a pioneering global history and anthropology of mantras. Drawing on expertise from Southern Asia and exploring their evolving roles through the diaspora and digital media, the project will create a multimedia archive and museum exhibition alongside various academic publications and resources.
Objective
Over 4 million people in Europe, including Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh minorities and Yoga practitioners, use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, or syllables—for the purposes of ritual, prayer, contemplation and wellness. The term “mantra” itself has entered the vocabulary of most modern European languages. But how do mantras work? Where do they come from, and how did they spread around the globe? Despite their ubiquity and relevance, mantras have seldom been studied in their own right. This project will produce an unprecedented global history and anthropology of mantras, grounded in the PIs’ expertise on the very places and traditions where mantras originate–southern Asia, where mantras have been used in rites, meditation, worship, and healing for more than 3000 years. As mantras have been transmitted through diasporic networks, new religious movements, yoga and the internet, they have become central to religion and culture worldwide, while they also play a key role in traditional medicine and identity politics. Most scholarship to date has approached mantras through language and philology, privileging Sanskrit texts from elite contexts. Yet mantras have always been diverse, multimodal and multisensory, manifesting in manuscripts, on stones, in the voice through chanting, in the mind through meditation, and on the body through amulets, tattoos, and clothing. Bringing together leading scholars working across disciplines and cultural regions, this 6-year project will create sonic, visual and digital textual archives on the transcultural and multisensory lives of mantras, together with an exceptional array of academic deliverables and a museum exhibition. Raising awareness of mantras’significance from their origins in ancient South Asia to their modern ramifications in the global North, the MANTRAMS project will produce the first-ever scientific project entirely dedicated to understanding the relevance of mantras at a global scale.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- engineering and technology materials engineering textiles
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- humanities languages and literature literature studies history of literature
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion religions
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-SyG
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1010 Wien
Austria
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