Amy Allocco

Allocco's current research project is titled "The Drummer-Priests of South India: Intergenerational Learning in a Tamil Performance Tradition." This ethnographic study analyzes the story, song, and ritual repertoires of three generations of hereditary Tamil Hindu drummer-priests called pampaikkarar to understand a South Indian performance tradition in transition. Focusing on performances and life stories, it examines the co-constitutive nature of the drummers’ ritual efficacy and musical virtuosity, explores intergenerational learning and transmission of expertise, and traces innovation through social media experimentation. Beyond attending to these unstudied specialists, it delineates how changing religious, narrative, and visual tastes and shifting relationships with technology are reshaping Tamil devotional performance culture today. Allocco carried out nine months of fieldwork in India connected to this project with the support of a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship (2023-2024). During her research period, she presented two lectures on her preliminary findings:

·       “Drumming, Decoration, Divination, and Dialogue: Vernacular Tamil Hindu Modalities,” Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar (SSN) College, Chennai, India (2024)

·       “Ritual Arts, Access, and Aesthetics: Sensory Dimensions of Tamil Hinduism,” Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras, Chennai, India (2024)

She will return to South India for additional research and fieldwork on this project in early 2025.

Allocco's other research project and (in-progress book) is titled Living with the Dead: Invitation and Installation Rituals in Tamil South India. Her ethnography investigates the ongoing ritual relationships that Hindus maintain with their dead kin and focuses on ceremonies to honor deceased relatives called puvataikkari (“the woman wearing flowers”), including both those performed annually to seek generalized blessings and occasional, elaborate invitation rituals in which ritual drummers summon the spirit, convince it to possess a human host, and beg it to “come home” as a protective family deity. She locates these ceremonies within the broader repertoire of rituals that Tamil Hindus, both Brahmin and non-Brahmin, perform for dead kin as well as those intended to honor their family deities (kulateyvam). With fellowship support from Fulbright-Nehru, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, Allocco spent the 2015-2016 academic year in Chennai working on this research project, building on preliminary fieldwork on the same topic conducted in 2011, 2008, and 2005-2007. Immediately following her sabbatical she began presenting conference papers, keynotes, and plenary addresses associated with this research (see selected list below). Allocco then spent the first month of 2018 conducting follow-up fieldwork associated with her Living with the Dead project in South India and offered an invited lecture focused on dead relatives who serve as Tamil family deities (kulateyvam) at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. In early 2019 Allocco again conducted short-term follow-up research in Tamil Nadu in association with this project, including on the Mayana Kollai festival in Chennai, and presented a plenary lecture at the University of Madras focused on how urbanization changes families' interactions with their lineage and household deities.

Relevant Publications

·     “Alcohol, Suicide, and Gendered Protest in Tamil Hindu Invitations to the Dead” (under review)

·     “Insistence, Persistence, and Resistance in Tamil Hindu Rituals to Call the Dead” (under review)

·      Wonder in the Cremation Ground: The Affective and Transformative Dimensions of an Urban Tamil Hindu Festival." In Wonder in South Asia: Politics, Aesthetics, Ethics, ed. Tulasi Srinivas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 167-95. https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/Wonder-in-South-Asia (2023)

·      “Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89 (1): 103-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab026 (2021)

·      “Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 13 (2): 144-71. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiaa007 (2020)

Relevant Conference Papers and Invited Lectures

·       “Drumming and Description: Divine Agency and Embodiment in Tamil Hinduism,” The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI (2024)

·       “Traces of the Deified Dead in Hindu South India,” International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism, Sapienza University of Rome (2024)

·       “Ritual Relationships with the Dead in Hindu South India,” The First International Conference on Critical South Asian Death Studies, University of Münster (2024)

·       “Kinship, Gender, Power, and Place in Tamil Rituals to Domesticate the Dead,” The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI (2023)

·       “Technologies of Insistence and Resistance in Rituals to Call the Dead in Hindu South India,” European Association for the Study of Religions/International Association for the History of Religions, Vilnius, Lithuania (2023)

·       “Prayer and Presence: Festival and Everyday Relations among the Living, the Dead, and the Goddess,” Conference on the Study of Religions of India (CSRI), Colby College, Waterville, ME (2022)

·       “Drumming and Dialogue: Summoning the Dead in Hindu South India,” Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, Austria (2022)

·       “Hindu Death Practices and Ancestor Worship in Tamil South India,” The Institute of Asian Studies, Charles University, Czech Republic (2022)

·       “Enlivening the Goddess and Feeding the Dead,” SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, University of London, London, England (2022)

·        “When the Dead Will Not Be Denied: Insistence, Persistence, and Resistance in Puvataikkari Pujas,” The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI (2021)

·         “Living with the Dead in Hindu South India,” Asia-Orient Institute, University of Tübingen, Germany (2020)

·         “Goddess in Life, Goddess in Death: Aspiration, Gendered Expectations, and Narrative Multiplicity in Urban South India,” South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University (2019)

·         “Ritual Relationships with the Dead in South Indian Hinduism,” University of Helsinki, Finland (2019)

·         “Gathering the Ganges: Transferring Power in Tamil Ritual Contexts," Eighth South and Southeast Asian Association for the Study of Culture and Religion Conference, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2019)

·         “Making the Dead Visible in the City: Urbanization and Hindu Ritual,” Plenary Address, “Multipli’City of Spaces: Religion, Culture, and Urbanity in India” conference, University of Madras, Chennai, India (2019)

·         “Dealing with the Dead in Tamil Ritual: Desire, Dialogue, and Deception,” University of Oslo, Norway (2019)

·         “Ten Years, Few Certainties: Interpretive Ambivalence and Gendered Tensions in Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives,” The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI (2018)

·         “‘Tell us your name and do as we say!’: Concealing and Revealing in the Making of Family Gods in Tamil Nadu,” Conference on the Study of Religions of India, University of California at Davis, CA (2018)

·         “The Dead Women aamil Nadu: An Ethnographic Approach to Tamil Rituals,” University of Madras, Chennai, India (2018)

·         “Amid Flowers and Flames: Decorations for the Dead in Domestic Tamil Ritual,” The Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI (2017)

·         “Transacting with the Dead: Social and Ritual Possibilities in Tamil South India,” Seventh South and Southeast Asian Association for the Study of Culture and Religion Conference, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2017)

·          “‘Protect us! Support us! You are our family deity!’: Ritual Relationships with the Dead in Tamil South India,” Keynote Address for “Deities, Spirits, and Demons in Vernacular Beliefs and Rituals in Asia” conference, University of Tartu, Estonia (2017)

·          “‘With Drums We Call Him and with Our Tears We Keep Him’: Transforming Restless Spirits into Household Deities,” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Montreal, QC (2009)