By Joanne Punzo Waghorne
Many Hindus this day are city middle-class individuals with spiritual values just like these in their specialist opposite numbers in the US and Europe. simply as sleek pros proceed to construct new church buildings, synagogues, and now mosques, Hindus are erecting temples to their gods anywhere their paintings and their lives take them. regardless of the perceived exoticism of Hindu worship, the day-by-day way of life of those avid temple consumers differs little from their suburban associates. Joanne Waghorne leads her readers on a trip via this new middle-class Hindu diaspora, targeting their efforts to construct and aid locations of worship. She seeks to track the altering spiritual sensibilities of the center sessions as written on their temples and at the faces in their gods. She deals specific comparisons of temples in Chennai (formerly Madras), London, and Washington, D.C., and interviews temple clergymen, devotees, and consumers. within the technique, she illuminates the interrelationships among ritual worship and spiritual edifices, the increase of the trendy international economic system, and the ascendancy of the nice center category. the result's a entire portrait of Hinduism as lived at the present time through such a lot of either in India and through the international. Lavishly illustrated with specialist photos through Dick Waghorne, this publication will attract paintings historians in addition to city anthropologists, students of faith, and people attracted to diaspora, transnationalism, and traits in modern faith. it may be specially beautiful for path use since it introduces the trendy Hinduism practiced by means of the chums and associates of scholars within the U.S. and Britain.
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