Swayam Bagaria

Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies

Education

PhD, Johns Hopkins University

Profile

Swayam Bagaria joined Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 2022. Prior to coming here, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the College Fellows Program. He received his PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2020.

He is an anthropologist interested in the psychosocial aspects of religion, particularly Hinduism. His work combines computational, cognitive, and socio-cultural methods to understand the formation and persistence of religious and religion-like beliefs and commitments in contemporary India.

His first book provides a new framework to understand the bespoke internal plurality of Hinduism and its capacity to allow a diverse set of regional sects with their own set of beliefs and practices and with differing states of cultural and social organization to subsist. What allows such a staggered and differentiated system of beliefs, extensively called Hinduism, to persist? His book provides a path to better understand the conditions of this unstable state of equilibrium by studying the adaptive dynamics of an otherwise hidebound custom, the commemoration of the practice of widow immolation, amongst one of the most affluent economic groups in India. By focusing on this edge case as well as using other comparative examples, his book describes the various mechanisms of cultural transmission and selection through which belief systems are changed and updated within Hinduism.

Bagaria's second book is on the relation between spirituality and mental health in India in the last century. In dialogue with scholarship from cultural psychology, medical anthropology, cognitive science and contemporary global mental health, the book looks at the writings of Indian psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors that led them to search for a theory of mental equanimity in the writings on Hinduism. In addition, the book also documents the repeated efforts at devising a battery of psychometric tests that would be uniquely suitable to assess the personality and behavior of a predominantly Hindu populace. Going beyond the usual case studies of yoga and meditation, the book tracks the evolving troika of changing ideas of psychological health, their relation to the evolving socio-economic environment of India, and the differing concepts and perceptions of the self on which they are based.

He has also written on the impact that an acknowledgement of the salience of religious identity and belief in India has had on the design of constitutional orders, the framing of foreign policy, and on understanding the economics of dead assets. Other interests include using computational social science to study belief formation, comparative constitutional law, contemporary psychedelic sciences, and the cultural economics of religion.

Courses

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