Gods in the World

Placemaking and Healing in the Himalayas

Aftab S. Jassal (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

272 Seiten

2024
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21496-4 (ISBN)

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In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them—in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities.

Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.

Aftab S. Jassal is an assistant professor of anthropology as well as affiliate faculty in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Prelude: The Healing Room
Introduction: Textures of Divine Presence
1. Making “Dev-bhumi,” the Land of the Gods
2. Affliction and Healing
3. Political Divinities in the Village Square
4. Undoing Love: Ghost Affliction and Patrilocal Marriage
5. Out of Place: Lives of Oracles and Priests
6. Playing in the Rain: Scenes from a Himalayan Pilgrimage
Epilogue: Beyond Belief
Indian-Language Words with Diacritics
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	13.09.2024
Reihe/Serie	Religion, Culture, and Public Life ; 52
Zusatzinfo	2 Maps
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-231-21496-0 / 0231214960
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21496-4 / 9780231214964
Zustand	Neuware