Patrick S.D. McCartney, PhD, is an anthropologist and Phoenix Fellow at Hiroshima University’s Faculty of Letters in Japan with a doctorate in sociolinguistic and cultural economic anthropology from the Australian National University (2016). His interdisciplinary research spans classical philology, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and computational social science, focusing on Sanskrit revival movements, yoga and wellness cultures, and the politics of language, heritage, and development in South Asia and beyond. He has conducted extensive ethnographic and demographic research on Sanskrit and its sociocultural imaginaries, including the concept of “Sanskrit-speaking” villages and the global circulation of Sanskrit through yoga and soft power networks. As part of a broader analytical focus on Cultural Imagination as Infrastructure: Language, Ritual, and Metaphysical Development Across Asia, his current research and next book focus on the Ethnohistory of Ritual Pole-Climbing Acrobatics at Agricultural Festivals across Asia .