Other ISM Courses

Courses taught by ISM fellows listed elsewhere at Yale and open to ISM students

Note: Some courses are listed at the Divinity School or the School of Music and cross-listed in other departments. To avoid undue duplication on this website, you will find these under Divinity or Music. The courses on this page are those not listed at Divinity or Music.

RLST 539b, Sensing the Sacred in India: Sensory Culture in South Asian Religions This seminar explores South Asian religions through the body, the senses, and aesthetics. Drawing on Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, and concentrating on embodied practices such meditation, chanting, eating, sex, asceticism, ritual, possession, and performance, we examine experiences of the sacred in India, past and present. How has sensory culture—the sound of mantras, the smell of incense, the touch of a guru’s embrace—shaped lives, practices, and doctrines? What place does the gratification (or denial) of the senses have in South Asian traditions? Drawing on premodern texts as various as law codes, erotic handbooks, and medical treatises, and integrating a range of new media from ethnographic films to graphic novels, this course plunges into the rich sense-worlds of religions in South Asia. Finnian M.M. Gerety