Dr. Amanda Lucia

Amanda Lucia (PI and R&SAP Leadership Team member) is professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside. Her research engages the global exportation, appropriation, and circulation of Hinduism. She is author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (2020), which investigates the intersections of whiteness and religious exoticism among the “spiritual, but not religious” at transformational festivals, such as Bhakti Fest, Wanderlust, Lightning in a Bottle, and Burning Man, with a particular focus on yoga practice. Her previous publications include Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014) and numerous articles. She is currently crafting a body of research on media representations of gurus, with particular attention to scandal. www.amandajeanlucia.com

Supported Project:

Dr. Amanda Lucia, “(Dis)Figuring the Guru: Power, Representation, and Discourse in the Archive”

The figure of the guru is and has been a fractal signifier that defies easy representation. Characterized in the colonial archive with terms like guroo, jogi, swami, sadhoo, and fakir – the guru defies any singularity. In Indian sources as well, the guru appears to be “uncontainable” (Copeman and Ikegame, 2012), crossing boundaries and expanding into multiple domains simultaneously. The guru exists as both a liminal and transgressive figure. The guru is neither family nor stranger, intimate nor distanced; he is neither of society nor fully outside of it. While the guru is a revered and protected figure, he (and his compatriot the yogi) are also understood to be potentially dangerous - or even “sinister” (White 2009).

There is a growing field of scholarship focused on gurus of modernity, particularly their distinctive religious views, spiritual methods, and utopian communities. There is also burgeoning content analyzing guru discourses and the simultaneous creation of cosmopolitan and global networks (Aravamudan2006). But less work has been done on the discourses that surround the guru - the descriptions of, the talk about, the scandals of, the framing of, and so on. (Dis)Figuring the Guru aims to fulfill that lacuna, drawing attention to discourses and representations of the guru in modernity – in the colonial archive and in contemporary media. In it, I question, fundamentally, the power of discourses to create that of which they speak.

This project traces the figure of the liminal, transgressive, nefarious, and sexually dangerous guru through the colonial archive and up through contemporary discursive fields that inform, transmit, and give substance to allegations of sexual abuse in global guru communities. I argue that the discourses surrounding abuse allegations are a performative forum through which society teaches itself about right ethnicity, religion, subjectivity, and sexuality.