Rhythms of Life

Apffel-Marglin, Frédérique:
Rhythms of life : enacting the world with the goddesses of Orissa / Frederique Apffel-Marglin. - New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2008. - xi, 292 S. - (Oxford collected essays)
ISBN 978-0-19-569419-2 / 0-19-569419-8
Rs 750,00
US$ 16,30 (Eastern Book Corp.)
US$ 19,95 (Munshiram Manoharlal)

Beschreibung
The nine essays in this volume are based on the author's fieldwork in Puri, Orissa between 1975 and 1993. During this eighteen-year period, she focused on two sets of rituals—one, in and around the temple of Jagannātha, studied mostly through the lens of the rituals of the Devadasis; the other, the festival of Raja Parba at Bali Haracandi, which celebrates the menses of the earth, sea, goddesses, and women. These essays contain detailed and rich re-tellings of complex rituals with their attendant stories and myths. They have been put together fifteen years after the author left the field of Indian studies. What she sees in these essays today is that the world of goddesses, gods, spirits, demons and the like, is real. However, the nature of this 'real' is strikingly different from the notion of the real as understood since the Scientific Revolution. Here she deals with a few ideas and categories that prevent such a realization—'the subaltern', 'the third-world woman', 'the sacred', and 'history'. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Acknowledgements.
1. Introduction: Are Goddesses real?
I. SHAKTI: REGENERATING THE WORLD THROUGH ILLNESS, DEATH, AND FEMALE SEXUALITY
2. Types of oppositions in Hindu culture.
3. Female sexuality in the Hindu world.
4. Who has the potency? (With Dennis Hudson).
5. Death and regeneration: Brahmin and non-Brahmin narratives.
6. Smallpox in two systems of knowledge.
II. DECONSTRUCTING MODERNIST CATEGORIES: THE "SUBALTERN'; THE 'THIRD WORLD WOMAN'; THE 'SACRED' HISTORY
7. Gender and the unitary self looking for the Subaltern in coastal Orissa (in collaboration with Purna Chandra Mishra).
8. Feminist orientalism and development (with Suzanne L. Simon).
9. Secularism, unicity, and diversity: the case of Haracandi's Grove.
10. Rhythms of life: ritual time and historical time.
Index.

Autorin
FRÉDÉRIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN, Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology at Smith College, US. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. She has published several books, three of them resulting from their joint work at World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER). After giving up fieldwork, she collaborated with intellectual activists in Peru, and is currently finishing a book based on her work there. She now collaborates with a Fair Trade Organic Coffee Cooperative in the Peruvian High Amazon.

Quellen: Oxford University Press (India); Amazon; Vedams Books; Munshiram Manoharlal; Eastern Book Corp.; WorldCat.