Scholars@Duke
Neena Mahadev

Neena Mahadev

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Religious Studies

Selected Publications

Buddhist “Magic” and Buddhist Modernism: Karma, Relatedness, and Hungry Ghosts in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Chapter · October 1, 2025 Based on comparative anthropological fieldwork observations in Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United States, this chapter examines the lived experience of prēta or “hungry ghosts” in Asian Buddhist lifeworlds. The chapter parses out and defines the spectrum ... Full text Cite

Rhetorics of Violence After the War

Internet Publication · September 11, 2024 Link to item Cite

Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka

Book · October 31, 2023 Featured Publication Awarded the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, 2024. Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocoloni ... Cite

The Charism of the Christian Left Dissidence as Habit in a Time of Bi-polar Theopolitics

Journal Article Cambridge Journal of Anthropology · March 1, 2022 Featured Publication Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists, life histories, and a reading of a postcolonial archive of contextually grounded liberation theology, I explore the theopolitics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus ... Full text Cite

Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: mediating presence and distance

Journal Article Religion · January 1, 2022 This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations t ... Full text Cite

Karma and grace: Rivalrous reckonings of fortune and misfortune

Journal Article Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · September 1, 2019 Karma and grace are grammars for material and moral being, each offering onto-cosmological justification for the vicissitudes of destiny. Beyond their scriptural renderings, karma and grace are vernacular cosmologies, which in Sri Lanka, are engaged as rep ... Full text Cite

Post-war blood: Sacrifice, anti-sacrifice, and the rearticulations of conflict in Sri Lanka

Journal Article Religion and Society · January 1, 2019 Since 2009, in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's ethnic war, certain contingents of Sinhala Buddhists have lodged attacks against religious minorities, whom they censure for committing violence against animals in accordance with the dictates of their gods. Cons ... Full text Cite

Introduction: Religious plurality, interreligious pluralism, and spatialities of religious difference

Journal Article Religion and Society · January 1, 2019 The introduction to this special section foregrounds the key distinction between 'religious plurality' and 'interreligious pluralism'. Building from the example of a recent controversy over an exhibition on shared religious sites in Thessaloniki, Greece, w ... Full text Cite

Economies of conversion and ontologies of religious difference Buddhism, Christianity, and adversarial political perception in Sri Lanka

Journal Article Current Anthropology · December 1, 2018 Conflicts over conversion often involve divergent logics about religious publicity and persuasion. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Sri Lankan Buddhists began expressing renewed hostility toward Christians, who are seen as “unethically” converting ... Full text Cite

The maverick dialogics of religious rivalry in Sri Lanka: Inspiration and contestation in a new messianic Buddhist movement

Journal Article Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · March 1, 2016 A strand of Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalism that emerged in 2008 offers an unconventional rejoinder to evangelical efforts to intensify conversions. Pentecostals assert that Christ offers instantaneous salvation whereas Theravāda Buddhism demands slow passa ... Full text Cite