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Growing Up
The authors - an architectural historian (Niels Gutschow) and an indologist (Axel Michaels) - are presenting the second part of a trilogy of studies of life-cycle rituals in Nepal, carried out under the auspices of the Collaborative Research Centre "Dynamics of Ritual". The initiation of boys and girls of both Hindus and Buddhists of the ethnic community of Newars in the Kathmandu Valley are documented. The first part of the book presents elements of Newar rituals, the spatial background of Bhaktapur and the hierarchy of ritual specialists - illustrated by 21 maps. The second part documents with detailed descriptions the . rst feeding of solid food, birthday rituals, and pre-puberty rituals ...
Dead in Banaras
Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram, in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and closed-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. The hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world, the city is a medical metropolis anchored...
Visualizing Space in Banaras
The city of Banaras is widely known as a unique, impressive and particularly ancient historical place. But for many it is above all a universal, cosmic, and in a sense timeless sacred space. Both of these seemingly contrasting depictions contribute to how the city is experienced by its inhabitants or visitors, and there is a great variety of sometimes competing views: Kasi the Luminous, the ancient Crossing, the city of Death, the place of Hindu-Muslim encounter and syncretism, the cosmopolitan centre of learning, etc. The present volume deals with the multiple ways this urban site is visualized, imagined, and culturally represented by different actors and groups. The forms of visualizations...
Sugata Saurabha
The Sugata Saurabha is an epic poem that retells the story of the Buddha's life. It was published in 1947 in the Nepalese language, Newari, by Chittadhar Hridaya, one of the greatest literary figures of 20th-century Nepal. The text is remarkable for its comprehensiveness, artistry, and nuance. It covers the Buddha's life from birth to death and conveys his basic teachings with simple clarity. It is also of interest because, where the classical sources are silent, Hridaya inserts details of personal life and cultural context that are Nepalese. The effect is to humanize the founder and add the t.
Religion, Heritage and the Sustainable City
The speed and scale of urbanisation in India is unprecedented almost anywhere in the world and has tremendous global implications. The religious influence on the urban experience has resonances for all aspects of urban sustainability in India and yet it remains a blind spot while articulating sustainable urban policy. This book explores the historical and on-going influence of religion on urban planning, design, space utilisation, urban identities and communities. It argues that the conceptual and empirical approaches to planning sustainable cities in India need to be developed out of analytical concepts that define local sense of place and identity. Examining how Hindu religious heritage, b...
Little Buddhas
Edited by Vanessa R. Sasson, Little Buddhas brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in Buddhist literature, in particular historical contexts, and their role in specific Buddhist contexts today.
The Warp and the Weft
This book studies the impact of the communal violence of the early 1990s on the individual lives of the Muslim weavers of Banaras, with considerable focus on gender, identity and inter-community relations.
Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings
This pioneering book is the first full-length study of the matha, or Hindu monastery, which developed in India at the turn of the first millennium. Rendered monumentally in stone, the matha represented more than just an architectural innovation: it signaled the institutionalization of asceticism into a formalized monastic practice, as well as the emergence of the guru as an influential public figure. With entirely new primary research, Tamara I. Sears examines the architectural and archaeological histories of six little-known monasteries in Central India and reveals the relationships between political power, religion, and the production of sacred space. This important work of scholarship features scrupulous original measured drawings, providing a vast amount of new material and a much-needed contribution to the fields of Asian art, religious studies, and cultural history. In introducing new categories of architecture, this book illuminates the potential of buildings to reconfigure not only social and ritual relationships but also the fundamental ontology of the world.
Sound and Communication
In Hindu India both orality and sonality have enjoyed great cultural significance since earliest times. They have a distinct influence on how people approach texts. The importance of sound and its perception has led to rites, models of cosmic order, and abstract formulas. Sound serves both to stimulate religious feelings and to give them a sensory form. Starting from the perception and interpretation of sound, the authors chart an unorthodox cultural history of India, turning their attention to an important, but often neglected aspect of daily religious life. They provide a stimulating contribution to the study of cultural systems of perception that also adds new aspects to the debate on orality and literality.
Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800
Everyday political business in early modern cities took place under many different sources of tension. De facto establishment of the oligarchy in the government collided with the urban community’s expectations of participation and with the responsibility for common welfare which was supposed to be the guideline for policies in the municipal boards. Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe offers new interpretations of the governmental techniques applied by urban elites to cope with these tensions. Written by leading historians of urban history and based on a broad foundation of previously unpublished research the volume explores the procedures of decision-making in early modern cities from an international and micrological point of view. It examines the attempts of delegating and stabilising power through elections, asks for the different ways of developing and demonstrating consent or dissent within the cities’ walls—urban revolts included—and offers a new theoretical framework to describe and understand these phenomena adequately.
