Borayin Larios

Borayin Larios

Contact

E-Mail: borayin.larios@univie.ac.at
Web: https://univie.academia.edu/BorayinLarios

Ass-Prof. Borayin Larios received his M.A. degree in Religious Studies from the University of Fribourg and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He pursued his doctoral studies in Classical Indology and South Asian Studies at Heidelberg University, where he also served as a main researcher in the International Framework project Weltweites Zellwerk (2015). In 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ANR-funded project I-SHARE: The Indian Subcontinent's Shared Sacred Sites, where he investigated the dynamics of religious interactions and the politics of belonging in shared sacred spaces across South Asia. In the same year, he was hired as a university assistant (postdoc) in the modern South Asian studies section of our institute. In addition, he is also a core member of Proyecto YoLA, which investigates the genealogy and cultural developments of Yoga in Latin America, and he also collaborates with the Centre for Yoga Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Before returning to Vienna, Dr. Larios held positions as Head of the Indology Department at the French Institute of Pondicherry and as a researcher at the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO.

Currently, Dr. Larios is one of the three Principal Investigators of ERC Synergy MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia, which involves four academic institutions and has a total budget of 9,651,263 euros. It is a pioneering scientific endeavor dedicated to understanding mantras. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods from Indology, anthropology, sound studies, media studies, art history, and history of religions, the project will produce an unprecedented global history of mantras from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Bringing together leading scholars working across disciplines and cultural regions, this 6-year project will create sonic, visual, and digital textual archives on the transcultural and multisensory lives of mantras, together with a wide array of academic deliverables and a museum exhibition. The project's scientific consortium is formed by PIs Carola Lorea (University of Tübingen), Borayin Larios (University of Vienna), and Finnian Gerety (University of Oxford), in collaboration with Lead Researcher Andrea Acri (EPHE) and Senior Researcher Gudrun Bühnemann (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

Research Focus

Prof. Larios's research interests encompass a wide range of topics within Indian religious traditions, with a particular focus on contemporary and classical practices in Maharashtra. His interdisciplinary approach combines cultural anthropology, religious studies, and historical philology. He has published extensively on contemporary Vedic traditions, but his research interests also involve the anthropology and history of mantras, popular and everyday Hinduism, material religion, Yoga and Tantra traditions, and Ethno-Indology as a research method.

Selected Publications

Prof. Larios's publications include his first book in Open Access, "Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra" (2017), as well as numerous articles and papers on related topics. He continues to bridge historical and contemporary studies, offering new insights into the religious and cultural dynamics of global Southern Asia.