Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)

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Synopsis
Explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions—namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists intensification, which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges. This volume emphasizes an inclusive approach by bringing these two currents into sustained conversation. As Hindu traditions are increasingly expanding into new settings, including but not limited to new diaspora and new media contexts, the long-established yet ever changing scale of sweet/neutral/spicy unfolds in new ways, as well. The essays in this volume delineate these developments across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Indeed, the volume's multidisciplinary approach shows how these processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.
Copyright:
2025

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
354 Pages
ISBN-13:
9798855804072
Related ISBNs:
9798855804058, 9798855804065
Publisher:
State University of New York Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
State University of New York
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Religion and Spirituality, Social Studies, Philosophy
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Edited by:
Amy L. Allocco
Edited by:
Xenia Zeiler

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