About the Book

The essays in this book represent the fruits of an interdisciplinary study of four temples in Rajasthan jointly conducted by Lawrence A. Babb (anthropology), John E. Cort (religious studies), and Michael W. Meister (art history). The temples were chosen because they are both very ancient and also vibrantly functioning today. The results of the authors’ research dramatically vindicate the idea that when disciplines are combined, the result is greater than the sum of the parts. The essays presented here show that a functioning temple is many things at once. More than a mere physical structure, a temple is a center of economic activity, a focus-point for political power, and a confluence of social relationships of every conceivable sort. It is also an object of aesthetic contemplation and judgment. And perhaps above all, a temple is a locus of sacred power that evokes deeply-felt responses in those who worship there. These essays pull these many threads together in a volume unique in the extent to which it stresses the holistic approach to the study of India’s sacred centers.

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Contents

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About the Author / Editor

Lawrence A. Babb is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He has done field research in central, northern, and western India on both Hindu and Jain communities. His most recent book is “Alchemies of Violence: ” “Myths of Identity and the Life of Trade in Western India” (2004).

John E. Cort is Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He is the author of “Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India” (2001), as well as several dozen articles on the Jains. He is currently finishing a book on Jain narratives of icons and iconoclasm.

Michael W. Meister holds the W. Norman Brown Professorship of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the History of Art and South Asia Studies Departments. He has been editor of the “Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, Discourses on Siva, Making Things in South Asia, ” and other volumes and authored numerous articles on architecture and iconology. He is currently working on a book, “Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan.”

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