Anya Fredsell
Atlanta, GA| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program |
| Project Title: | Place-based Deities in Contemporary South India |
| Field of Study: | Anthropology |
| Home Institution: | Emory University, Atlanta, GA |
| Host Institution: | The American College, Madurai, Tamil Nadu |
| Grant Start Month: | October 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Anya Fredsell is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her academic interests include South Asian religions, Tamil language and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnography of religion. Her research relies on ethnographic methodologies to examine relationships among families, land, and deities in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India. Anya received her BA in religious studies from Elon University and an MTS in global religions from Emory’s Candler School of Theology.
Anya’s Fulbright-Nehru research project on place-based Hindu deities is examining, through ethnographic fieldwork, the shifting relationships between families, land, and religious practices in contemporary South India. Her research is analyzing the worship of Tamil lineage deities (kula devams) – the gods who are passed down generationally in families and who reside on ancestral land – to explore how conceptions of lineage and religious devotion are intimately tied to land and negotiated through the worship of place-based deities in South India. Despite contemporary processes of urbanization and migration that relocate families away from their native land, Tamil people continue to worship these deities by returning to ancestral villages or conducting elaborate rituals to permanently move their deities closer to the family. Drawing on her established research contacts and advanced Tamil language proficiency, Anya is following such movements of people and place-based deities by observing festivals and life-cycle rites, and through semi-structured interviews on family histories and deity narratives. The study is taking place in a village near the urban center of Madurai, Tamil Nadu. This project will form the basis of Anya’s doctoral dissertation at Emory University and is expected to culminate in her first book.