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Landscapes of Urban Memory The Sacred and the Civic in India's High-Tech City Smriti Srinivas |
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$82.50 Cloth |
A rich analysis of what this Indian city can tell us about the intersections of religion, civic life, and global transformation. Established in the middle of the sixteenth century, Bangalore has become in our day a center for high-technology research and production, the new "Silicon Valley" of India, with a metropolitan population approaching six million. It is also the site of the very popular annual performance called the "Karaga" dedicated to Draupadi, the polyandrous wife of the heroes of the pan-Indian epic of the Mahabharata. Through her analysis of this performance and its significance for the sense of the civic in Bangalore, Smitri Srinivas shows how constructions of locality and globality emerge from existing cultural milieus and how articulations of the urban are modes of cultural self-invention tied to historical, spatial, somatic, and ritual practices. The book hightlights cultural practices embedded in urbanization, and moves beyond economistic arguments about globalization or their reliance on the European polis or the American metropolis as models. Drawing from urban studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, religion, and history, Landscapes of Urban Memory greatly expands our understanding of how the civic is constructed. “Srinivas brings together material from diverse sources to produce this extremely well-researched piece of work. Most importantly, the book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on processes of modernization and change in contemporary urban contexts, effectively demonstrating how ritual performance enables disadvantaged groups to reclaim their city for themselves by reconfiguring its spatial, temporal, and narrative history to their advantage.” —American Ethnologist “This book is a real work, both empirically and analytically. In this book, Srinivas offers a model for understanding urban memory that must now be read, not just for its insights into religious performances in Bangalore, but for the questions it now sets for understanding urban memory elsewhere—including here.” —American Journal of Sociology “This important book signals the value of bringing theory in the human sciences to bear on the study of Indian complexities, which is to say that it is a work of disciplined interdisciplinary reflection on some fascinatingly interrelated topics.” —Journal of Asian Studies “Smriti Srinivas’s beautiful book presents a rich analysis of the relationship between urban spaces, symbolic forms, and political meanings.” —Urban Affairs Review “This books makes a very important contribution to our understanding of religious practice, and of the organization of human communities, through its focus on the city. This focus is particularly significant given the fact that, overwhelmingly, earlier scholarship on religion and society in contemporary South Asia has centered around the village. As cities increasingly become places where people make their homes and livelihoods and create social identities and religious meanings, Srinivas’s study of Bangalore, in southern India, is indeed timely. Srinivas is wholly persuasive in her argument for the importance of ‘the civic’ as a category of analysis and provides an excellent discussion and review of the relevant scholarship. A very valuable contribution.” —Journal of Contemporary Religion Smriti Srinivas is assistant professor of comparative and cultural studies of religion at Ohio State University. 376 pages | 29 figures, 17 tables, 16 maps | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Civic Rituals in the New “Silicon Valley” Appendix: Survey of Vahnikula Kshatriya Households in Bangalore |
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$27.50 Paper