Economy

This chapter explores possibilities for locating religious formations at the intersections of culture and economy. Not solely the preserve of professional economists, economy is a term that has expanded in scope to include economies of signs and desires that generate values beyond the pricing mechanisms of the modern capitalist market. To illustrate how religion can be situated in a cultural economy, this chapter focuses on how one animated film, Destination Earth (1956), sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, serves to illustrate a political economy of the sacred in which the oppression of communist collectivism is opposed to the freedom promised by American free-market capitalism. Viewing this film provides an occasion for highlighting three features of the political economy of the sacred: mediations between economic and sacred values; mediations between economic scarcity and sacred surplus; and mediations among competing claims to legitimate ownership of the sacred.

Making Land Sacred: Inscriptional Evidence for Buddhist Kings and Brahman Priests in Medieval Bengal

In research on premodern South Asia, land-grant inscriptions have typically been mined for historical and geographical data. This article suggests that copperplate land-grant inscriptions may also provide an overlooked source of evidence for ideas about sacred space within and between South Asian religions. It focuses on inscriptions recording the granting of land by Buddhist kings to Brahman priests in medieval Bengal, and it hones in on the literary, oral, ritual, and performative elements of the inscriptions in relation to the spaces delineated by acts of granting. Drawing upon broader theoretical discussions concerning gift-giving in relation to economies and exchanges of religious prestige and royal power, it attempts to offer new perspectives towards gift-giving and the economy of the sacred in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In the process, it attempts to draw out some of the broader ritual and “religious” implications of what is typically treated as an “economic” transaction – namely, the transfer of land from royal to priestly control, which forms the heart of the copperplate’s function and formation.