In The Cow in the Elevator Tulasi Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present a joyful, imaginative, yet critical reading of modern religious life. Drawing on nearly two decades of fieldwork with priests, residents, and devotees, and her own experience of living in the high-tech city of Bangalore, Srinivas finds moments where ritual enmeshes with global modernity to create wonder—a feeling of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime. Offering a nuanced account of how the ruptures of modernity can be made normal, enrapturing, and even comical in a city swept up in globalization's tumult, Srinivas brings the visceral richness of wonder—apparent in creative ritual in and around Hindu temples—into the anthropological gaze. Broaching provocative philosophical themes like desire, complicity, loss, time, money, technology, and the imagination, Srinivas pursues an interrogation of wonder and the adventure of writing true to its experience. The Cow in the Elevator rethinks the study of ritual while reshaping our appreciation of wonder's transformative potential for scholarship and for life.
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Tulasi Srinivas uses the concept of wonder—feelings of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime—to examine how residents of Banglore, India pursue wonder by practicing Hindu religious rituals as a way to accept and resist neoliberal capitalism.
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A Note on Translation  xi Acknowledgments  xiii O Wonderful!  xix Introduction. Wonder, Creativity, and Ethical Life in Bangalore  1 Cranes in the Sky  1 Wondering about Wonder  6 Modern Fractures  9 Of Bangalore's Boomtown Bourgeoisie  13 My Guides into Wonder  16 Going Forward  31 1. Adventures in Modern Dwelling  34 A Cow in an Elevator  34 Grounded Wonder  37 And Ungrounded Wonder  39 Back to Earth  41 Memorialized Cartography  43 "Dead-Endu" Ganesha  45 Earthen Prayers and Black Money  48 Moving Marble  51 Building Wonder  56 Interlude: Into the Abyss  58 2. Passionate Journeys: From Aesthetics to Ethics  60 The Wandering Gods  60 Waiting . . .  65 Moral Mobility  69 Gliding Swans and Bucking Horses  70 The Pain of Cleaving  74 And the Angry God  80 Full Tension!  84 Adjustments  86 Life and . . .  91 Ethical Wonders  92 Interlude. Up in the Skyye  95 3. In God We Trust: Economies of Wonder and Philosophies of Debt  99 A Treasure Trove  99 Twinkling Excess  107 The Golden Calf  111 A Promise of Plenitude  114 "Mintingu" and "Minchingu"  119 "Cash-a-carda?" Philosophies of Debt  128 Soiled Money and the Makings of Distrust  131 The Limits of Wonder  133 4. Technologies of Wonder  138 Animatronic Devi  138 Deus Ex Machina  140 The New in Bangalore  142 The Mythical Garuda-Helicopter  143 Drums of Contention  152 Capturing Divine Biometrics  157 Archiving the Divine  159 Technologies of Capture  162 FaceTiming God  164 Wonder of Wonders  169 5. Timeless Imperatives, Obsolescence, and Salvage  172 "Times have Changed"  172 The Untimeliness of Modernity  175 Avelle and Ritu  178 Slipping Away  181 When Wonder Falls  183 Time Lords  187 Dripping Time  188 The Future, The Past, and the Immortal Present  204 Conclusion. A Place for Radical Hope  206 Radical Hope  206 Amazement in Turmeric  210 The Need for Wonder  213 Afterword. The Tenacity of Hope  216 Notes  219 References  247 Index  265  
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"[The Cow in the Elevator] teased me into questioning what Srinivas has so beautifully and chillingly thought through for decades—wonder as an ethical practice."
"This pathbreaking book is about the politics of wonder in the ritual life of a Hindu neighborhood in a major Indian city. The book itself is a wondrously written treatment of the saturation of neoliberal lives by a radical cosmology of performance, affect, and technicity, through which ritual life transfigures the pains and puzzles of modernity. It should be read by all students of ritual, affect, and emergent practices of globalization."
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822370796
Publisert
2018-05-29
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Tulasi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement, and coeditor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia.