Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Shaligrams are both fossils and living deities, born of the sacred landscape of Mustang. For pilgrims, Mustang is home to multiple sacred sites belonging to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bon. The land is also conceptualized as a body, wherein the Kali Gandaki River Valley is simultaneously the location where the Hindu deity Vishnu manifests himself as a sacred stone as well as the place where the corpse of a great Buddhist/Bon demoness (sinmo) is continuously subdued through ritual and sacred architecture. Any ethnography of Shaligrams must therefore account for intersections of mobility, time, place, and access. This is because the consolidation of movement and ritual is what enlivens Shaligrams and begins the process wherein they become living members of a community.
Keywords: ethnography, Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Himalayas
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
− Anita DesaiIf ethnography is the “writing of culture”, then it must also include the perspectives of the researcher, embedded in specific cultural contexts and working to make some narrative sense out of many bits and pieces of confusing and sometimes contradictory information. When I began this research in India in 2012, I had initially set out to study the construction of deity altars in Hindu homes contrasted with deity care in temples. I knew that this kind of work would require a fair degree of long-distance traveling as well as what Clifford Geertz refers to as “deep hanging-out” when it came time to visit individual homes and spend time with local families. Fortunately, attempting something as vague and imprecise as hanging out was quickly expedited by the amount of work that always needs to be done in households full of children and extended relatives. As I helped cook evening meals, offered to assist with the care of the household deities, and did my best to distract rambunctious children or feed hungry animals, I quickly found warm welcomes in many different places. It was then, in a village in West Bengal, that I first encountered Shaligrams.
The first time I heard the term “Shaligram”, I was almost dismayed that, despite several years of studying religion in South Asia, I had never heard of such a thing before.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas , pp. 47 - 76Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020