South Asia Guest Lecture Series - Elisa Iori (Erfurt), Room Ruhrpott (4.13)
Spatialising Buddhist Practices in Urban Spaces: A 'City-Lens' Approach
By moving beyond the walls of monumental religious architecture, this talk adopts a city-lens approach to the investigation of lived Buddhism in the third-century cities of northern Gandhara. Based on the evidence available for the city of Barikot (Swat, N Pakistan), the layered complexity of urban religiosity is approached here through a contextual analysis of the built-up environment and intra-site spatial distribution of artefacts.
The aim is to (a) highlight the everyday religious practices in domestic spaces and (b) observe how the city space and urban life might have fostered changes in terms of architecture, practices and media of religious communication used by the 'urban' samgha.
