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JENNIFER SAUNDERS Project title: "Leaping Across the Ocean: Hinduism in a Transnational Family" Middle class, urban Hindus exist in a world that has been shaped by colonialism, nationalism and, increasingly, transnationalism. When someone leaves India for new economic opportunities elsewhere, the family he or she leaves behind will never be the same. Just as a bride’s family loses the daughter it once knew, the family of a transnational migrant sacrifices the intimacy of frequent face-to-face contact. The former retains its ties to the daughter who has been transformed into the wife of another family, being drawn into a new network of exchanges of people and gifts. The transnational family, also changed, becomes part of a global system where ideas, goods, and people move across nations. In this process, such tangible exchanges alter the personal, ethnic, and religious identities of the remaining family members as well as create new imagined possibilities of existence. My ethnographic study of an extended Hindu family living in India and the United States will examine the ways transnationalism has altered the Hindu experience through an analysis of the stories family members tell about religious figures, themselves, and their cousins abroad and rituals that are both explicitly and implicitly religious. I will pay particular attention to how work and economic opportunities in the United States drive these processes.
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