Dead in Banaras
An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling
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ISBN:
9780192864284
Publication date:
12/10/2022
Hardback
184 pages
Price: 1495.00 INR
We sell our titles through other companies
Disclaimer :You will be redirected to a third party website.The sole responsibility of supplies, condition of the product, availability of stock, date of delivery, mode of payment will be as promised by the said third party only. Prices and specifications may vary from the OUP India site.
ISBN:
9780192864284
Publication date:
12/10/2022
Hardback
184 pages
Dr Ravi Nandan Singh
The work is an anthropological analysis of death and the dead, which attempts a significant reworking of the idea of death that is prevalent in Hinduism.
Rights: World Rights
Dr Ravi Nandan Singh
Description
Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram, in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and closed-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. The hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world, the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Early on, while undertaking fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the' dead' had a chance encounter with the author's father's death in the city. The same set of places, thereafter, spoke through the sensory logic of the author's father's death. Dead in Banaras is, thus, both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity.
About the author:
The author teaches Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. He has also briefly taught at the department of sociology, Delhi School of Economics. His long-standing research interests centre around the anthropology of death, cremation as a contemporary global practice as well as grief and kinship. Apart from ethnographic research on funeral travelling in contemporary Banaras, the author has also studied cremation as a shifting ethical practice in twenty-first century Europe across two different locations, Denmark, and more recently, northern Italy.
Dr Ravi Nandan Singh
Table of contents
Chapter 1 Following the Dead: Corpse as Multiple Social Condition
Chapter 2 The City Multiple: Place-Names Play Dead
Chapter 3 Good, Bad Death: Family Necrology and Hospital Sojourn
Chapter 4 Crying and Listening: Forms of Mourning and Community
Chapter 5 Conversation of Pyres: Seen and Unseen Passages of Crematorial Aesthetics and Ethics
Dr Ravi Nandan Singh
Description
Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram, in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and closed-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. The hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world, the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Early on, while undertaking fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the' dead' had a chance encounter with the author's father's death in the city. The same set of places, thereafter, spoke through the sensory logic of the author's father's death. Dead in Banaras is, thus, both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity.
About the author:
The author teaches Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. He has also briefly taught at the department of sociology, Delhi School of Economics. His long-standing research interests centre around the anthropology of death, cremation as a contemporary global practice as well as grief and kinship. Apart from ethnographic research on funeral travelling in contemporary Banaras, the author has also studied cremation as a shifting ethical practice in twenty-first century Europe across two different locations, Denmark, and more recently, northern Italy.
Table of contents
Chapter 1 Following the Dead: Corpse as Multiple Social Condition
Chapter 2 The City Multiple: Place-Names Play Dead
Chapter 3 Good, Bad Death: Family Necrology and Hospital Sojourn
Chapter 4 Crying and Listening: Forms of Mourning and Community
Chapter 5 Conversation of Pyres: Seen and Unseen Passages of Crematorial Aesthetics and Ethics
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