Wonder in South Asia
Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics
Format:Hardback
Publisher:State University of New York Press
Published:1st Nov '23
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£27.00(9781438495279)
A comparative study of wonder in South Asian religions.
The experience of wonder-encompassing awe, bewilderment, curiosity, excitement, fear, dread, mystery, perplexity, reverence, surprise, and supplication-and the ineffable quality of that which is wondrous have been entwined in religion and human experience. Yet strangely, wonder in non-western societies, including South Asia, has rarely been acknowledged or understood. This groundbreaking volume brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning of wonder in such varied joyful, tense, and creative sites and moments as Sufi music performances in Gujarat, Tamil graveyard processions, trans women's charitable practices, Kipling's Orientalist tales, village Kuchipudi dance performances, and Rajasthani healing shrines. Offering a synthetic and scholarly reading of wonder that speaks to the political, aesthetic, and ethical worlds of South Asia, these essays redefine the nature and meaning of wonder and its worlds. Taken together, they provide an invaluable research tool for those in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions in particular.
"…an important and welcome contribution to approaching wonder as an analytic for anthropological studies on religion in India, and South Asia more broadly … By foregrounding how wonder is evoked, produced and captured, the book makes it both amenable to, and a tool of, anthropological enquiry. The volume provides us with a fresh perspective to understand contemporary South Asian religiosities as to their creativity, ethics, politics and the possibilities of individual and collective transformations." — Contributions to Indian Sociology
"Exploring manifold manifestations and encounters of wonder in various regions and religions of South Asia, this volume refines scholarly engagement with wonder both as a theoretical category that expands our understanding of South Asian religion and as a meaningful, affective constituent of the religious and ethnographic experience. The strength of the collection lies in the breadth of its case studies, which range across the subcontinent, and its depth of application within each of the chapters." — Caleb Simmons, author of Singing the Goddess into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad
ISBN: 9781438495286
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 608g
366 pages