Anja Pogacnik
PhD candidate
- Department of Religious Studies
Contact details
- Email: anja.pogacnik@surfasurfa.com
- Web: anjapogacnik.tumblr.com
Address
- Street
-
New College
Mound Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 2LX
Background
I obtained a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2012 with the highest mark, and continued my studies at the University of Edinburgh, where I completed a MSc in Religious Studies with distinction in 2014 with a project on Leicester Jain women. Only a few months later I continued my Edinburgh education with a PhD in Religious Studies. In my doctoral thesis I am focusing on the Jain community in Leicester, England, utilising participant observations and unstructured open-ended interviews to better understand how the practice and understanding of Jainism in Leicester have changed (and how they haven’t) under the influence of the English cultural environment.
CV
59367.pdf
Research summary
My doctoral project titled ‘Exploring Religious Change in Jain Diaspora: Changes in the Interpretation, Practice and Implementation of Jainism the Leicester Jain Community’ is focusing on a particularly understudied and often overlooked segment of the global religious landscape, i.e., the Jain diaspora. There are only about 25,000 Brits, who identify with this 2,500-year-old South Asian religious tradition promoting non-violence and asceticism, yet they have erected numerous temples and have a strong international presence. The Leicester Jain community in particular, which counts roughly 1,500 members, holds the ownership of the ‘first Jain temple in the Western world’ and is the seat of the organization representing all European Jains.
Since followers of Jainism have arrived to England fairly recently, the community’s religious practices are still being shaped by the effects of migration and life in diaspora. By exploring the changes in their interpretations and practices of Jain teachings my project aims to understand the influence of the social environment on religious practice in diaspora and the religious change it engenders. To gather the necessary data on religious change in diaspora I am spending eight months conducting fieldwork with the Leicester Jain community performing interviews and participant observations, and complementing it with a two-month-long fieldwork segment in Jamnagar, India, to elaborate on the differences between a native and diasporic practice of Jainism. The accumulated information will speak not only to the scholarship on Jainism, South Asian diaspora, and religious change, but will also provide insights into the complex relationship between religion and culture.