Amy L. Allocco, an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, presented a paper titled “Making Mountains out of Anthills at a South Indian Goddess Temple” at a conference organized around the theme “Mountains in the Religions of South and Southeast Asia: Place, Culture, and Power” in the capital city of Thimphu in the Kingdom of Bhutan.
The June 30-July 3 meeting was sponsored by the South and Southeast Asian Association for the Study of Culture & Religion under the auspices of UNESCO, and was a regional conference of the International Association for the History of Religions.
The largest-ever international gathering in this tiny Himalayan kingdom wedged between Tibet to the north and India to the south, the conference attracted 250 scholars from more than 60 countries.
Allocco also participated in two days of post-conference tours organized by local hosts from the Institute of Language and Culture Studies at the Royal University of Bhutan. These tours brought conference attendees to Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as to other cultural sites in two different valleys of mountainous western Bhutan.