This episode features a conversation about the Matua community with Carola E. Lorea, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. Lorea is interested in gender, oral traditions, and popular religious movements in South Asia, and she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. Lorea is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (Brill, 2016), and with Rosalind Hackett, she also co-edited the volume Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024, IIAS “Global Asia” series). Her latest book is Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal, published this year by Wesleyan University Press. Through an ethnographic approach that is both multimodal and multi-sited, the book explores how sound and performance shape the large community of Matua devotees across time and space. In this conversation, Carola discusses the centrality of music, performance, poetry, and storytelling within the history and contemporary religious lives of the Matua community across the Bay of Bengal.
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