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For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.
Every few decades, thousands of Hindu villagers in the Central Himalayas of North India carry their regional goddess Nandadevi in a bridal palanquin to her husband Shiva's home, walking barefoot over icebound mountain passes to a lake surrounded by human bones. This Royal Pilgrimage of Nandadevi is a ritual dramatization of the post-marital journeys of married women from their natal homes to their husbands' homes. Mountain Goddessis an anthropological study of this pilgrimage and the cult of Nandadevi, especially as they relate to local women's lives. The author shows how Nandadevi's appeal stems from the fact that her mythology parallels the life-courses of the local peasant women, and that her ritual procession imitates their annual journey to the village of their birth. Drawing on formal Indian theories, verbal commentaries, songs, interviews, articles, propaganda, legends, pan-Indian Sanskrit liturgies, historical documents, and the author's remarkable personal account of the pilgrimage, this gripping narrative is a unique resource for courses in the anthropology of religion, Hinduism, and folklore, ritual, and gender studies.
Mobile Lifeworlds illustrates how the imaginaries and ideals of Western travellers, especially those of untouched nature and spiritual enlightenment, are consistent with media representations of the Himalayan region, romanticism and modernity at large. Blending tourism and pilgrimage, travel across Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Northern India is often inspired and oriented by a search for authenticity, adventure and Otherness. Such valued ideals are shown, however, to be contested by the very forces and configurations that enable global mobility. The role ubiquitous media and mobile technologies now play in framing travel experiences are explored, revealing a situation in which actors are neither here nor there, but increasingly are ‘inter-placed’ across planetary landscapes. Beyond institutionalised religious contexts and the visiting of sacred sites, the author shows how a secular religiosity manifests in practical, bodily encounters with foreign environments. This book is unique in that it draws on a dynamic and innovative set of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, especially phenomenology, the mobilities paradigm and philosophical anthropology. The volume breaks fresh ground in pilgrimage, tourism and travel studies by unfolding the complex relationships between the virtual, imaginary and corporeal dynamics of contemporary mobile lifeworlds.
The goals of this book are to update information on the effects of rural road development, both in Nepal and globally, explain the environmental, socioeconomic, and sociocultural impacts of expanding rural road networks in the Nepalese Himalaya, and to promote further studies on rural road development throughout the world based on studies and investigations performed in Nepal. Readers will learn about the history of rural road development, as well as the challenges to effectively design and construct rural roads and how these obstacles may be overcome. Chapter one offers a global review of road development, and both the positive and negative impacts of rural road implementation. Chapter two defines mobilities within the context of coupled social and ecological systems, specifically in the Nepalese Himalaya. Chapters three through five detail the environmental, socioeconomic, and sociocultural impacts expanding rural road networks through several case studies. The concluding chapter summarizes the findings of the book, discussing the need for interdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration to avoid negative consequences. This book will be of interest to teachers, researchers, policy makers, and development organizations.
This book is an account of an interesting and adventurous journey and a trek by seven friends to sacred shrines of Badrinath, Kedarnath and Hemkund Sahib, situated at between 10,000 feet and 15,000 feet in interior Himalayas amidst snow peaks and unparalleled scenic beauty, These are sacred pilgrimage centers on the banks of the sacred river Ganga and the Hemkund lake, visited every year by hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs from India and abroad. Of great interest to general readers interested in the myths and legends associated with the River Ganga and the Himalayas. Also of great interest to foreign tourists and trekkers.
When John Crock of Bristol University began research in the Zangskar valley of Ladakh in 1977 his prime intention was to investigate the social anthropology of the area through studies of village life. In 1986 Crook returned to Ladakh with into the social organisation, history, meditational practices and philosophy of the yogins who still lived and practiced in the remote parts of the area. This book is a record of the author's adventurous journeys to meet some remarkable men. The yogins were often generous, providing accounts of their training, one of them allowing Crook to photograph a Mahamudra by the eminent Tipun Padma of this difficult work together with that of a biography of the great women yogin Machig Labdron provides the basis for extensive and original discussions of the meaning of Tibetan Buddhism and it's significance in our time.
Tibet’s Mount Kailas is one of the world’s great pilgrimage centres, renowned as an ancient sacred site that embodies a universal sacrality. But Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography demonstrates that this understanding is a recent construction by British colonial, Hindu modernist, and New Age interests. Using multiple sources, including fieldwork, Alex McKay describes how the early Indic vision of a heavenly mountain named Kailas became identified with actual mountains. He emphasises renunciate agency in demonstrating how local beliefs were subsumed as Kailas developed within Hindu, Buddhist, and Bön traditions, how five mountains in the Indian Himalayan are also named Kailas, and how Kailas sacred geography constructions and a sacred Ganges source region were related.