Middle-Class Dharma

Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism

Jennifer D. Ortegren (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

320 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-753079-5 (ISBN)

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Middle-Class Dharma is an ethnographic study of upwardly-mobile Hindu women in urban India. Jennifer D. Ortegren explores how women's shifting lifestyle choices in the middle classes are critical for shaping Hindu traditions and identity, and in doing so, argues for how we can understand class as religious.

Middle-Class Dharma is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one.

Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate--that is, what is dharmic--as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new dharmic boundaries and religious selfhoods in the middle classes. Such transitions can be as joyful as they are difficult and disorienting.

Middle-Class Dharma explores how contemporary Hindu women's everyday practices reimagine and reshape Hindu traditions. By developing dharma as an analytical category and class as a dharmic category, Ortegren pushes for expanding definitions of religion in academia, both within and beyond the study of Hinduism in South Asia.

Jennifer D. Ortegren is Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College. She specializes in the ethnographic study of religions in contemporary South Asia, particularly Hinduism and Islam, with a focus on women, ritual, and class, as well as shifting relationships between Hindu and Muslim neighbors.

List of Figures/Captions
Acknowledgments
Notes on Transliteration
"A Cast of Characters"

Introduction: Defining Middle-Class Dharma
1. Arranging Marriage, Negotiating Dharma
2. Solah Somwar and Conjugal Dharma
3. Karva Chauth and the Dharma of Neighbors
4. Ganesha Chaturthi and the Boundaries of Dharma
5. Dharma and Discomfort During Navaratri
6. New Neighborhood, New Dharma
Conclusion: Drawing on Dharma to Expand our Research and Teaching

Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	18.04.2023
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	236 x 162 mm
Gewicht	567 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-19-753079-6 / 0197530796
ISBN-13	978-0-19-753079-5 / 9780197530795
Zustand	Neuware