POLDEI · Political Deification: Theorising from Asia

Political deification—i.e. the transformation to and treatment of political leaders as divine beings—occurs in various religious and national contexts in Asia and has been understood as instances of messianism, custodianship, sacred kingship, martyrdom, pacification, and charismatic authority among others. These concepts travel, intersect, and imbue the different political systems in Asian countries. Yet they have been studied only as discrete political phenomena, not as related and overlapping concepts under an overarching theory that explains the deification of political leaders. POLDEI will build a transdisciplinary theory of political deification by using case studies from East, South-East, and South Asian countries to analyse popular cultural concepts that address the deification of political leaders. This transdisciplinary project will use innovative methods from film studies, visual/performance studies, and culture studies, in addition to the study of religion, political science, and anthropology, to interpret the popular understanding of such religiopolitical phenomena. The project POLDEI will develop a theory of political deification to understand how the legitimacy of political rule is grounded in concepts derived from religious worldviews. This theory built from Asia is not just for Asia. The proposed theory will provide us with the analytical tools and conceptual categories we need to decode the contemporary challenge of rising religious nationalisms not just in Asia but at the global level. From the perspective of the history of science, the project will test the results of this radical act of relocating not just the ground of theory but also the geopolitical pattern of applicability.