Project description
The true legacy of Tantra
For centuries, Tantra has shaped the socio-religious landscape of southeastern Asia, yet it remains poorly understood and is often misrepresented in pop culture. In this context, the ERC-funded MANTRATANTRAM project will study Tantra within its broader historical and geographical context. This initiative seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and the limitations of Area Studies by examining Tantra as a dynamic, interconnected phenomenon across Monsoon Asia. Focusing on the mediaeval period, the project will analyse diverse textual sources and art historical evidence in Sanskrit, vernacular, and non-Indo-Aryan languages. By doing so, it will reveal Tantra’s complex network of cultural exchanges, enhancing our appreciation of its impact on the region’s shared religious heritage.
Objective
Tantra dominated the Hindu and Buddhist socio-religious landscape across much of southeastern Asia from ca. the 7th to the 13th century. Once perceived ambivalently by scholars, and often still misrepresented in global pop culture as a form of sexual practice, the study of Tantra has now become a burgeoning academic subfield. However, the impact of Tantra on the religio-cultural history of Asia is still underappreciated, and disciplinary limitations as well as the Area Studies paradigm, fragmenting Asia into discrete areas, hamper our global understanding of this translocal phenomenon. Transcending these boundaries, the project will study Tantra from the perspective of cultural contact between different communities across the geo-environmental region referred to as Monsoon Asia, approaching the phenomenon in a global manner and in terms of connected histories rather than in isolation according to distinct regional contexts. Taking the medieval as its chronological framework, it will investigate textual corpora in Sanskrit, vernacular, and non-Indo-Aryan languages that have seldom been studied in a comparative manner, and complement the textual data with art historical evidence. In so doing, it will frame the emergence, transfer, and transformation of Tantra as a mobile and multi-centric network of people, languages, and objects that circulated across a vast interconnected region sharing common geo-environmental factors (e.g. the periodical monsoon winds). Besides uncovering the interactions between elite and nonelite socio-cultural milieus in the constitution of tantric traditions, it will also transcend the asymmetrical framing of premodern cultural relations between South Asia and the remainder of the wider Indic world, and highlight the shared religious heritage in a vast region that hosted the majority of the world population both historically and in the present, which has been artificially fragmented by national and global geopolitical configurations.
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.
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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 - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
75014 PARIS
France
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