The Migrant Priests of the Tamil Diaspora Hindu Temples: Caste, Profiles, Circulations and Agency of Transnational Religious Actors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many aspects of the contemporary transnationalization of Hinduism have already been well studied, such as long-distance nationalism or the sense of belonging to a transnational community, but very little attention has been paid to the ritual actors who actually circulate within the diaspora space. Based on biographical interviews conducted in two major countries of Hindu immigration (Mauritius and Canada), this article proposes to shed light on the Hindu temple priests who migrate from South India and Northern Sri Lanka to meet the ritual needs of the Tamil diaspora, which is particularly involved in the Hindu temple constructions that have multiplied throughout the world since the 1980–1990s. By focusing on their caste, their migratory profiles, their circulation, and their agency, the article shows that these “migrant priests” actively contribute to shaping the forms that transnational Hinduism takes in different Tamil immigration countries. More broadly, it is argued that it is necessary to pay attention to this type of “circulating” religious actors to fully understand the current stakes, trends, and mechanisms of the transnationalization of Hinduism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".