Connecting and Educating Hindus: Hinduism Today and the Mediatization of a Global Hinduism

Neubert, Frank (November 2014). Connecting and Educating Hindus: Hinduism Today and the Mediatization of a Global Hinduism (Unpublished). In: Religious Press and Print Culture. Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. 19.-22.11.2014.

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Hinduism Today is a quarterly magazine that appears in roughly 15.000 copies, shipped to nearly 60 countries worldwide. The majority of readers are Hindus in diverse diaspora countries, mainly Singapur, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad und the USA. Its editors are monks of Kauai Adheenam, belonging to the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, situated in Kauai, Hawai’i, USA. One of the magazine’s declared goals is to foster global Hindu solidarity and educate Hindus worldwide about their religion.
In this paper, I want to take a look at the history of this magazine in connection with the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, and at the development of the expressed aims behind its publication. For this, I draw on fieldwork done in Kauai in January, 2014. After a brief introduction to some theoretical and methodological preliminaries of my work, I shall, give an overview of the history of the Śaiva Siddhānta Church, founded by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Following this, I will deal in more detail with the origins and development of the magazine and the websites connected with it. I will focus especially on the role the magazine was intended to play for global Hindu diasporas. A fourth chapter will analyze the modes of definition employed in order to depict Hinduism as a unified global religion. In conclusion, I shall briefly reflect upon the specific agenda of “Global Hinduism” and the strategies of positioning as followed by the publishers of Hinduism Today.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute for the Science of Religion

UniBE Contributor:

Neubert, Frank

Subjects:

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems > 070 News media, journalism & publishing
200 Religion
200 Religion > 290 Other religions

Language:

English

Submitter:

Frank Neubert

Date Deposited:

09 Dec 2015 09:00

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:50

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Medien Globalisierung Hinduismus Diaspora

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/73696

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