The American Academy of Religion Book Awards for Excellence are given anually in three categories--Analytical-Descriptive Studies, Constructive-Reflective Studies, and Historical Studies.

The 2005 Analytical-Descriptive Studies award goes to Joanne Punzo Waghorne for her Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World. Oxford University Press.

Jurors Comments:

Joanne Punzo Waghorne's Diaspora of the Gods gives us a strong, elegantly written, historically grounded and imaginative ethnographic study of middle-class Hindu religion in the city of Chennai and several cities of the Hindu diaspora. Waghorne's history of temple building in Chennai, along with her assessment of the contemporary dynamics of temple construction in the larger Indian community, help us rethink the relationship between the global and the local, the rural and the urban, and the great and little traditions in India. This book marks the maturation of Religious Studies and makes a substantial contribution to urban studies, to temple studies, to Hindu studies, to studies of (post)modern religion, to the study of religion. Perhaps most significantly this book provides insights into the globalization of religion, insights transcending the typical cant and superficiality, insights that therefore, happily, can be used responsibly in the classroom. Both accessible and memorable, Diaspora of the Gods is a work of religious studies at its finest.