10% off all books and free delivery over £50
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

Death in Banaras

View All Editions (1)

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

Death in Banaras Synopsis

As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites which ensure that the departed attains a 'good state' after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world. This book is primarily about the priests and other kinds of 'sacred specialists' who serve them: about the way in which they organise their business, and about their representations of death and understanding of the rituals over which they preside. All three levels are informed by a common ideological preoccupation with controlling chaos and contingency. The anthropologist who writes about death inevitably writes about the world of the living, and Dr Parry is centrally concerned with concepts of the body and the person in contemporary Hinduism; with ideas about hierarchy, renunciation and sacrifice, and with the relationship between hierarchy and notions of complementarity and holism.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780521460743
Publication date:
Author: Jonathan Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 314 pages
Series: Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
Genres: Social and cultural anthropology
Hinduism
Sociology: death and dying
Cultural studies