Jugaad (hindi, जुगाड़): an innovative solution that bends the rules or the use of a quotidian idea/object in a new way.

The Jugaad Project is an open-access digital educational platform for the study of material culture, embodiment, and belief/religious practices. It consists of a journal of the same name where issues are published twice a year, generally, and the Embodied Worlds podcast that complements the issue with deeper dives into themes. Founded by anthropologist Urmila Mohan, this platform is also shaped by a volunteer women-led working group that is dedicated and knowledgeable, and aims at scholarly rigor as well as dialog through diversity and innovation. Through this approach, The Project has fostered permanent channels of exchange, connecting those within and beyond academia in the Global South and North. (See testimonials from our diverse collaborators.) We work with scholars and artists to showcase and circulate their ideas, and support exchange across theory and practice.

Our focus is on the importance of lived reality (bodily and material) in the study of religion. Our approach to the study of ‘Material Religion/belief in Context’ is inspired by the practice of Jugaad as frugal innovation in South Asia, and its equivalents in other parts of the world. While there are socio-cultural differences, we are broadly interested in how subjects and objects interact through improvisation, bricolage, diy, making do, and hacking. As such, we resist the ‘colonizing’ or siloing of knowledge through inter-disciplinary collaborations across anthropology, sociology, cultural history, classics reception, archeology, religious studies, urban studies, political science, and design, art, and craft studies.

We define Material Religion as how and why people use material interfaces/mediums, such as objects, bodies, spaces, and senses to connect the reality of their lives with beliefs of various kinds. By focusing on beliefs and the ways they are imagined, evaluated, mediated, and manipulated we explore how people deal with the invisible, spiritual, supernatural, magical, mystical, ancestral, and/or divine to achieve certain goals. By adding the word context we draw attention to the historic and contingent nature of terms such as ‘religion’ as well as interrogating the relevance of place, practice, knowledge, and experience. That is, our study of beliefs (secular, civic, spiritual), and their objects and subjects is in dialog with how materialities are diverse, transformative, and productive as well as attendant concerns of power and relationality. How do humans imagine, manifest, and mediate realms such that they are perceived as tangible, efficacious, and real? How are humans shaped in turn?

Brief History, 2014-present

Our story begins with the Material Religions blog, founded in 2014 by Urmila Mohan and John J. McGraw (1974-2016) as a result of discussions at a conference on religious subjectivation hosted by University College London. That site evolved from a blog to a digital journal and experimental group, The Jugaad Project, where our focus continues to be on the importance of lived reality (bodily and material) in the study of religion and belief. This open-access experimental research and publication group is run by a team of volunteers who are independent, flexible and global in outlook. We pay special attention to context in covering the diversity of global belief practices with inputs from other disciplines. In 2020, and in the wake of the pandemic, we expanded our scope to include transformatory affects and practices of belief in politics.

What does the term ‘Jugaad’ mean?

On our site we define it as “an innovative solution that bends the rules or the use of a quotidian idea/object in a new way.” We associate our project with the notion of ‘hacking’ or frugal innovation which has its roots in South Asian usage but expand it to explore whether and how other cultures and societies innovate religious practices, beliefs and ideas. Dynamics of the messy, improvised, and emergent are part of life but instead of associating Jugaad practices with notions of cheapness or expediency (as they are sometimes), we purposely aim to reposition the term and thus the project as a site of innovation, focusing on quotidian acts of making, doing, and knowing. As part of Jugaad politics, we aim at being inclusive and supportive of emerging creators through our editorial and curatorial vision and practice.

Why do you emphasize ‘bodies’ and ‘materials’?

Our content features a common interest in the roles of bodies and materials in religion with attendant concerns of (in)tangibility, (in)visibility, real vs. imaginary, and the relationship between discursive and procedural modes of knowledge. Our ideas draw upon our relationship with the Matière à Penser group and scholars, such as Jean-Pierre Warnier and David Morgan, whose works deal with aspects of praxeology, performance and embodiment whether or not directly connected with the domain of religion.

See our Archive.