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Kristin Bloomer
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2008
Kristin Bloomer’s research pertains to Christianity in postcolonial south India. More generally, her interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of subjectivity, with particular attention to religiosity, gender, and embodiment. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Making Mary: Hinduism, Catholicism and Spirit Possession in Contemporary Tamil Nadu,” is an ethnography of Marian spirit possession in India’s most southeastern state. Theoretically, her work addresses questions of religious hybridity and postcoloniality, ritual and performativity, feminist approaches to ethnography, and relationships between religion, gender, and the body. Her methods aim to explore and interrogate ideas of agency and of subjectivity that pertain not only to the postcolonial “Other,” but also to the anthropologist-scholar. While a great deal of recent scholarship has explored rituals of spirit possession prevalent among village Hindus in Tamil Nadu, Bloomer’s work complements a smaller body of literature showing that such rituals are not limited to Hindus, nor to villages, nor to so-called Hindu goddesses, but extend also to city people, to Christians, and to the Virgin Mary. Her work, furthermore, aims to contribute to a reflective, relational approach to the anthropological study of religion: one that recognizes the historically specific skills required for the cultivation of the self.
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