num_pages: 247
description: In this moving ethnographic portrait of Hindu renouncers sadhus or asceticsin northern India and Nepal Sondra L. Hausner considers a paradox that shapes their while ostensibly defined by their solitary spiritual practice the stripping away of social commitments and their break with family and community renouncers in fact regularly interact with householder society. They form a distinctive alternative community with its own internal structure but one that is not located in any single place. Highly mobile and dispersed across the subcontinent its members are regularly brought together through pilgrimage circuits on festival cycles. Drawing on many years of fieldwork Hausner presents intimate portraits of individual sadhus as she examines the shared views of space time and the body that create the ground for everyday experience. Written with an extraordinary blend of empathy compassion and anthropological insight this study will appeal to scholars students and general readers alike.
language: English
title: Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas
publisher: Indiana University Press