Description

Book Synopsis
There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world's collective imaginationas a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia.Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India's most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating spacefirst with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognitionis one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroache

Neighborhood of Gods The Sacred and the Visible

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    A Hardback by William Elison

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      Book details

      Publisher The University of Chicago Press
      Published 12 October 2018
      ISBN-13 9780226494876
      978-0226494876
      ISBN-10 022649487X
      Also in:
      Hinduism

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world's collective imaginationas a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia.Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India's most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating spacefirst with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognitionis one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroache

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