000 02399nam a22003015i 4500
001 22459969
003 OSt
005 20230217152135.0
008 220310s2022 nyu 000 0 eng
010 _a 2022934443
020 _a9780192864284
_q(hardback)
040 _aDLC
_beng
_erda
_cIISERB
042 _apcc
082 _223
_a306.609548 S6173D
100 1 _aSingh, Ravi Nandan.
_928822
245 1 0 _aDead in Banaras :
_bethnography of funeral travelling
_cRAVI NANDAN SINGH.
260 _aOxford:
_bOxford University Press,
_c2022.
263 _a2205
300 _axx, 163p.
520 _a"Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters, and mysteriously so such encounters come true. 'Dead in Banaras' is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it sets out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue, and the aghorashram in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well-known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and close-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic 'inside' of the city. Hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the 'local moral world' the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real-life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving, and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Then, early on in fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the 'dead' had a chance encounter with my father's death in the city. The same set of places henceforth spoke through a sensory logic of my father's death. Dead in Banaras is then both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity"--
650 _aHindu funeral rites and ceremonies.
_928834
650 _aCremation-religious aspects-Hinduism.
_928835
650 _aDeath-religious aspects-Hinduism.
_928836
650 _aHinduism-custom and practices-Vanarasi-India.
_928837
906 _a0
_bibc
_corignew
_d2
_eepcn
_f20
_gy-gencatlg
942 _2ddc
_cBK
999 _c9927
_d9927