The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurved…
In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within its broader religious and ecological contexts. For centuries, the enmeshing of Shiva with the Himalayan environment has animated how Hindus conceptualize and experience Kedarnath. The floods publicly affirmed the fundamentally Himalayan and Shiva-orie…
"The Monastery Rules discusses the position of monks and monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies. Using the monastic guidelines (bca’ yig) as primary sources, this book examines the impact of Buddhist monastic institutions on Tibetan societies by looking at their monastic policies that deal with organization, economy, justice, and public relations. As this type of literature has n…
Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don strī-vēṣam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. According to the hagiography of Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi d…
In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices.Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blo…
Books on Southeast Asian nationalist movements make very little — if any — mention of women in their ranks. Biographical studies of politically active women in Southeast Asia are also rare. This book makes a strong case for the significance of women's involvement in nationalist movements. The authors show women negotiating their own subjectivity and agency at the confluence of col…
In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within its broader religious and ecological contexts. For centuries, the enmeshing of Shiva with the Himalayan environment has animated how Hindus conceptualize and experience Kedarnath. The floods publicly affirmed the fundamentally Himalayan and Shiva-orie…
In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, …
Today as in the past, perhaps no other great culture of humankind is so markedly characterised by traditions in the field of nutrition as that of South Asia. In India food has served to express religious values, philosophical positions or material power, and between norms and narration Indian literature has dedicated ample space to the subject, presenting a broad range of diverse or variously a…