Hindu Ritual at the Margins
Subtitle: Innovations, Transformations, Reconsiderations
By: Edited by Linda Penkower and Tracy Pintchman
Contributors: Clothey, Fred W., honouree
Series: Studies in Comparative Religion
Publisher: The University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Columbia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9781611173895; 9781611173901
Subjects: Hinduism; Congresses; Rituals
Description: Hindu Ritual at the Margins explores Hindu forms of ritual activity in a variety of "marginal" contexts. The contributors collectively examine ritual practices in diaspora; across gender, ethnic, social, and political groups; in film, text, and art; in settings where ritual itself or direct discussion of ritual is absent; in contexts that create new opportunities for traditionally marginalized participants or challenge the received tradition; and via theoretical perspectives that have been undervalued in the academy. In the first of three sections, contributors explore the ways in which Hindu ritual performed in Indian contexts intersects with historical, contextual, and social change. They examine the changing significance and understanding of particular deities, the identity and agency of ritual actors, and the instrumentality of ritual in new media. Essays in the second section examine ritual practices outside of India, focusing on evolving ritual claims to authority in mixed cultures (such as Malaysia), the reshaping of gender dynamics of ritual at an American temple, and the democratic reshaping of ritual forms in Canadian Hindu communities. The final section considers the implications for ritual studies of the efficacy of bodily acts divorced from intention, contemporary spiritual practice as opposed to religious-bound ritual, and the notion of dharma.
Notes: Based on presentations at a conference called "Ritualizing in, on, and across the Boundaries of the Indian Subcontinent" in honor of Fred W. Clothey on the occasion of his retirement and held at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2006.

Includes bibliographical references and index.