For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1. Living Fossils
- Impressions of a Once and Future World
- Moving in Time with Life
- A Lifetime of Movement
- Deities as Multispecies
- Precious Persons of Stone
- What is a Shaligram?
- Writing an Inconstant World
- Into the Foothills
- Structure of This Book
- 2. Spiral Notebooks
- A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- Bodies and Landscapes
- Living History
- An Ethnography of Mobility in Time and Place
- Keeping Up with Shaligrams
- The Practice of Shaligram Ethnography
- Tangled Up in Texts
- The View from Ten-Thousand Feet
- 3. Picked-Up Pieces
- Constructing a History of Mustang
- A Brief Fossil History of the Himalayas
- Shaligram Ammonites
- Mustang, Historically Speaking
- Mustang in the Modern Day
- Temples in the Clouds
- 4. A Mirror to Our Being
- Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- Introducing the Ritual Landscape
- The Gateways of Experience
- 5. A Bridge to Everywhere
- The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- Tattva Mimamsa, or All Existing Things
- Bodily Attachments and the Making of Persons
- Tirtha, the Bridge to Everywhere
- The Birthplace of Shaligram
- Stones as Bodies
- Bridging the Gaps
- 6. Turning to Stone
- The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- The Formation of Shaligrams by Vajra-Kita or the Thunderbolt Worm
- The Formation of Shaligrams by River and Mountain
- Bouts of Chastity and Other Curses Vishnu has Endured
- Channels into the Mainstream
- 7. River Roads
- Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- What Does It Mean to Move?
- Arriving in Jomsom
- Reaching Kagbeni
- The View from Muktinath
- Approaching the Summit
- 8. Ashes and Immortality
- Death and the Digital (After)Life
- The Death of Shaligram
- Shaligram Online
- Paths in Stone
- The Lee of the Stone
- Conclusion
- Touch Stones
- Shaligram Stones in an Ammonite World
- Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Secundary Sources
- Index
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