project

The Worlds of Mandaean Priests

1 October 2013 - 31 March 2018

PI/s in Exeter: Professor Christine Robins (formerly Allison)

Research partners: Prof Albert de Jong (University of Leiden)

Funding awarded: £ 215,000

Sponsor(s): Arcadia Fund

Project webpage(s)

The Worlds of Mandaean Priests

About the research

Christine Allison, in collaboration with Prof Albert de Jong of the University of Leiden, has been awarded a grant of £215,000 by the Arcadia Fund, for the project ‘The Worlds of Mandaean Priests’.

The Mandaeans are one of the world’s most endangered religious minorities. The aim of this project is to preserve as much of their religious knowledge as possible by making recordings: of interviews with as many of the priests as possible, and of the rituals themselves. We will visit individuals in both homeland and diaspora and we aim to capture the full range of religious rituals and the variant traditions within the priesthood. We will also make an ethnographic film about the religious life of the community, which we hope will be shown widely. The interviews will be kept in perpetuity in Exeter’s online Digital Repository and will be freely available on the Internet, in accordance with Exeter’s Open Access policy.