Amy Allocco
Dr. Amy L. Allocco is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars program at Elon University (North Carolina, USA), where she teaches courses on the religions of South Asia, particularly Hindu traditions, as well as about Hindu goddesses, ethnography, and gender in Islam. Her research focuses on vernacular Hinduism, especially contemporary Hindu ritual traditions and religious practices in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where she has been studying and conducting ethnographic fieldwork for more than 20 years. In addition to her current research project, Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Installation Rituals in Tamil South India, Allocco has conducted fieldwork in Tamil-speaking communities in Sri Lanka. Allocco’s work is animated by interests in the forms of religious change inspired by the new social and economic realities that characterize a globalizing South Asia, as well as narrative, everyday religion and gender in urban India. She joined the faculty at Elon in 2009 after earning her PhD in Emory University's Program in West & South Asian Religions. Allocco is also the 2019 recipient of Elon University's Ward Family Excellence in Mentoring Award. Elon’s College of Arts and Sciences honored her with the Excellence in Scholarship Award in 2021 and the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012. She previously held the University’s Distinguished Emerging Scholar professorship in Religious Studies and served as a Faculty Director in Elon’s residential campus for six years.
Phone: 336.278.6484
Address: 2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244 USA
Phone: 336.278.6484
Address: 2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244 USA
Phone: 336.278.6484
Address: 2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244 USA
Phone: 336.278.6484
Address: 2340 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244 USA
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With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical, she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Domesticating the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities. Details of two relevant publications, including her 2021 cover article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, are listed below.
Relevant Publications
· “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)
· “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Introduction.”
PART I: RITUAL INNOVATION AND POLITICAL POWER
Chapter 2: Nawaraj Chaulagain (Illinois Wesleyan University), “Coronation of the Hindu King: Tradition and Innovation in Nepalese History.”
Chapter 3: Anne T. Mocko (Concordia College), “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy: Notes on Nepal’s Bhoṭo Jātrā, 2006-2008.”
Chapter 4: Michael Baltutis (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Innovating the Ancient, Instantiating the Urban: the South Asian Indra Festival.”
Chapter 5: Luke Whitmore (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “Changes in Ritual Practice at the Himalayan Hindu Shrine of Kedārnāth.”
Chapter 6: Reid B. Locklin (University of Toronto), “Ritual Renunciation and/or Ritual Innovation? Re-describing Advaita Tradition.”
PART II: RITUAL AND THE ECONOMIES OF CASTE AND CLASS
Chapter 7: Matthew R. Sayers (Lebanon Valley College), “Ancestral Rites Re-worked: The Transition from Solemn to Domestic Modes of Feeding the Dead.”
Chapter 8: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu.”
Chapter 9: Shital Sharma (McGill University), “Consuming Kṛṣṇa: Women, Class, and Ritual Economies in Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism.”
PART III: RITUAL AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER
Chapter 10: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University), “Village Widow/Town Priestess:
Innovating Ritual Power in a Pilgrimage Economy.”
Chapter 11: M. Whitney Kelting (Northeastern University), “Leveraging Agency: Young Jain Women’s Ritual Innovations through the Updhān Fast.”
Chapter 12: Liz Wilson (Miami University of Ohio), “Ritual Innovation and Masculine Identity Formation in the Contemporary Cult of Lord Ayyappaṉ.”
PART IV: RITUAL INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 13: Charles S. Preston (University of Chicago), “Dancing the Vedas, Deritualizing Theory: A Study of ‘The Universal Truth’”
Chapter 14: Janet Gunn (Thorneloe College at Laurentian University), “Ganesha and the Chocolate Almonds: Ritual Innovation and Efficacy in Diaspora.”
Chapter 15: Sudharshan Durayappah (University of Toronto) and Corinne Dempsey (Nazareth College), “Recasting Sexuality, Gender, and Family through Contemporary Canadian Ritual Innovation.”
Jennifer D. Ortegren is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose work focuses on the intersections of religion and class among upwardly mobile women, and their families, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. She has published on the everyday and ritual lives of emerging middle-class Hindu women and is currently developing a project among Muslim women, including how class mobility impacts relationships between neighbors from diverse religious backgrounds and the role of women in mediating these relationships.
Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India
Guest Editors: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University) and Jennifer D. Ortegren (Middlebury College)
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/FIR/issue/view/1748
With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical, she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Domesticating the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities. Details of two relevant publications, including her 2021 cover article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, are listed below.
Relevant Publications
· “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)
· “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Introduction.”
PART I: RITUAL INNOVATION AND POLITICAL POWER
Chapter 2: Nawaraj Chaulagain (Illinois Wesleyan University), “Coronation of the Hindu King: Tradition and Innovation in Nepalese History.”
Chapter 3: Anne T. Mocko (Concordia College), “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy: Notes on Nepal’s Bhoṭo Jātrā, 2006-2008.”
Chapter 4: Michael Baltutis (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), “Innovating the Ancient, Instantiating the Urban: the South Asian Indra Festival.”
Chapter 5: Luke Whitmore (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “Changes in Ritual Practice at the Himalayan Hindu Shrine of Kedārnāth.”
Chapter 6: Reid B. Locklin (University of Toronto), “Ritual Renunciation and/or Ritual Innovation? Re-describing Advaita Tradition.”
PART II: RITUAL AND THE ECONOMIES OF CASTE AND CLASS
Chapter 7: Matthew R. Sayers (Lebanon Valley College), “Ancestral Rites Re-worked: The Transition from Solemn to Domestic Modes of Feeding the Dead.”
Chapter 8: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University), “Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu.”
Chapter 9: Shital Sharma (McGill University), “Consuming Kṛṣṇa: Women, Class, and Ritual Economies in Puṣṭimārg Vaiṣṇavism.”
PART III: RITUAL AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER
Chapter 10: Brian K. Pennington (Elon University), “Village Widow/Town Priestess:
Innovating Ritual Power in a Pilgrimage Economy.”
Chapter 11: M. Whitney Kelting (Northeastern University), “Leveraging Agency: Young Jain Women’s Ritual Innovations through the Updhān Fast.”
Chapter 12: Liz Wilson (Miami University of Ohio), “Ritual Innovation and Masculine Identity Formation in the Contemporary Cult of Lord Ayyappaṉ.”
PART IV: RITUAL INNOVATION IN CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 13: Charles S. Preston (University of Chicago), “Dancing the Vedas, Deritualizing Theory: A Study of ‘The Universal Truth’”
Chapter 14: Janet Gunn (Thorneloe College at Laurentian University), “Ganesha and the Chocolate Almonds: Ritual Innovation and Efficacy in Diaspora.”
Chapter 15: Sudharshan Durayappah (University of Toronto) and Corinne Dempsey (Nazareth College), “Recasting Sexuality, Gender, and Family through Contemporary Canadian Ritual Innovation.”
Jennifer D. Ortegren is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose work focuses on the intersections of religion and class among upwardly mobile women, and their families, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. She has published on the everyday and ritual lives of emerging middle-class Hindu women and is currently developing a project among Muslim women, including how class mobility impacts relationships between neighbors from diverse religious backgrounds and the role of women in mediating these relationships.
Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India
Guest Editors: Amy L. Allocco (Elon University) and Jennifer D. Ortegren (Middlebury College)
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/FIR/issue/view/1748
In a research article that contextualizes many of the benefits and challenges of conducting UR in global contexts, authors Vandermaas-Peeler, Allocco, and Fair develop a set of recommendations based on focus groups with students and offer a case study of effective instrumental and psychosocial mentoring practices utilized by mentors in a multidisciplinary research group. In the second paper, Allocco and Fredsell offer an elaborated account of highly engaged mentoring in a joint ethnographic research project in India that transformed not only the research but also the authors’ relationship and identities as scholars and feminists.
Intensive faculty-mentored UR is often conducted during the summer months. Heldt, Smith, Cunningham, and Miller discuss a collaborative model that facilitated students’ work in interdisciplinary and international research teams addressing global health research initiatives, as well as their knowledge and experience in communicating findings with peers and the public as they conducted mentored UR in Denmark.
Kuh (2008) argued that students should participate in at least two high-impact practices (HIPs) to augment opportunities for deep, engaged, and sustained learning. As the authors in the next set of papers demonstrate, the integration of UR and study away programs maximizes this potential. Campbell and Jones describe the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing a research-centered, short-term study abroad program in South Africa. Utilizing their expertise in the fields of history and psychology, the faculty directors scaffold students’ development and conduct of research projects and elucidate students’ perspectives by incorporating their voices into the paper. Bradley and Teitsort share benefits of combining UR and study abroad in course-integrated linguistic fieldwork research, particularly highlighting the advantages for the fields of social science and language science. Hall, Walkington, Vandermaas-Peeler, Shanahan, Gudiksen, and Zimmer offer a framework of salient mentoring practices and demonstrate how it can be used to support an emergent curriculum design project that embeds UR within a study abroad program in Scandinavia. Oppenheim and Knott explore the pedagogical dimensions of digital mentorship within a program that integrates UR and internships in grassroots social impact organizations. In exploring the combination of immersive global service-learning with internship experiences, this research team highlights student inquiry that is grounded in reflexivity, committed to polyvocality, and seeks to raise a certain kind of critical awareness.
As the impact of study away experiences on the home campus is virtually uncharted in extant scholarship on mentoring UR, the contribution of authors Duan, Little, Williams, Wagner, and Moritz is especially significant. Their paper describes a collaborative student research project spanning three contexts, two countries and two disciplines. In this unique model, students in a short-term study abroad course in China purchased one artistic object based on pre-departure research that later became part of the Elon University permanent art collection. In the following semester, another group of students in an on-campus course researched the historical meaning and cultural significance of the objects. The project culminated in an on-campus art exhibit showcasing the students’ research, illustrating how a collaborative student research project can serve as an engaging tool to bring short-term study abroad back to campus and mentor cross-disciplinary UR. In the issue’s final paper, authors Krumm, Perkowski, Mecouch, Woods, Shea, Goraya and Tran share an innovative on-campus course design in which students partnered with faculty and museum curators on research projects using digitized natural history collections. This collaboration provided students with opportunities to expand their understanding of global biological issues and experience different research communities.
Future Directions
Our work as co-editors of this special issue offers a unique opportunity to identify promising trajectories for future scholarship on mentoring UR in global contexts. The dialogues among faculty mentors, students, institutional and community partners, and many others, highlight the collaborative, innovative nature of mentoring within and across contexts and the importance of sustained, engaged professional networks to support these interactions longitudinally. The diverse contexts in which our colleagues are working to support student learning and engagement offer fertile opportunities for ongoing scholarship. Future research could analyze case studies that leverage innovative mentoring pedagogies and practices, synthesize salient mentoring practices across contexts, and identify shared challenges and recommended solutions from the perspectives of faculty mentors, students and community partners. The impact of students’ participation in faculty-mentored UR in diverse contexts on the participating institutions, including the home campus and off-campus partners, is an under-studied topic of the utmost importance for higher education. Scholarship examining the integration of two high-impact practices, undergraduate research and diversity/global learning, is essential for the development of evidence-based pedagogies, practices, and programs that support the highest quality teaching and learning. This is an emergent field of scholarship with immense potential and we anticipate future issues of PURM that elucidate the essential role of faculty mentors.
In closing, we would like to acknowledge the insightful, constructive, and expedient feedback that the reviewers offered the authors of this special issue. We also want to thank the Editor-in-Chief of PURM, Dr. Qian Xu, who works diligently to support the authors and editors behind the scenes. By sharing their wisdom and expertise, these scholars augmented the quality of each contribution and the special issue as a whole. We appreciate their contributions and offer them our sincere gratitude for their efforts on behalf of PURM.
Sincerely,
Amy L. Allocco, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director, Multifaith Scholars, Elon University
Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Director, Center for Research on Global Engagement, Elon University
Reference
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. AAC&U: Washington, D.C.
https://www.mentor-cmc.com/cmc/cmc2021/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=296#pg296