MANTRAMS
Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia
Part of the ERC Synergy Grant that takes place from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2030.
The project is led by the University of Vienna (UNIVIE), with the EPHE as a partner institution and Andrea Acri as the lead researcher on this project.
Principal Investigators
- Carola E. Lorea, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen
- Finnian M. M. Gerety, University of Oxford
- Borayin Larios, Universität Wien
Andrea Acri
Andrea Acri's research focuses on the religious history of India and Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the circulation of Shaivist and Buddhist tantric traditions.
Project summary
Through an interdisciplinary approach combining methods from Indianism, anthropology, sound studies, media studies, art history and the history of religions, the project will produce a history of mantras on a global scale from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view.
MANTRAMS is the very first large-scale scientific project dedicated to the in-depth study of mantras. Having crossed continents and cultures, mantras have never been studied as a global phenomenon until now. This project aims to understand how sound transforms reality and why mantras have been used by more than 1.5 billion people for rituals, meditation and healing. This project addresses fundamental questions about mantras: what are they and how do they work? How did they spread around the world in different media and materials? What impact do mantras have on identity, knowledge, and power?