In The Cow in the Elevator Tulasi Srinivas explores a wonderful world where deities jump fences and priests ride in helicopters to present a joyful, imaginative, yet critical reading of modern religious life. Drawing on nearly two decades of fieldwork with priests, residents, and devotees, and her own experience of living in the high-tech city of Bangalore, Srinivas finds moments where ritual enmeshes with global modernity to create wonder—a feeling of amazement at being overcome by the unexpected and sublime. Offering a nuanced account of how the ruptures of modernity can be made normal, enrapturing, and even comical in a city swept up in globalization's tumult, Srinivas brings the visceral richness of wonder—apparent in creative ritual in and around Hindu temples—into the anthropological gaze. Broaching provocative philosophical themes like desire, complicity, loss, time, money, technology, and the imagination, Srinivas pursues an interrogation of wonder and the adventure of writing true to its experience. The Cow in the Elevator rethinks the study of ritual while reshaping our appreciation of wonder's transformative potential for scholarship and for life.
- Cover
- Contents
- A Note on Translation
- Acknowledgments
- O Wonderful!
- Introduction. Wonder, Creativity, and Ethical Life in Bangalore
- Cranes in the Sky
- Wondering about Wonder
- Modern Fractures
- Of Bangalore’s Boomtown Bourgeoisie
- My Guides into Wonder
- Going Forward
- One. Adventures in Modern Dwelling
- The Cow in the Elevator
- Grounded Wonder
- And Ungrounded Wonder
- Back to Earth
- Memorialized Cartography
- “Dead-Endu” Ganesha
- Earthen Prayers and Black Money
- Moving Marble
- Building Wonder
- Interlude. Into the Abyss
- Two. Passionate Journeys: From Aesthetics to Ethics
- The Wandering Gods
- Waiting
- Moral Mobility
- Gliding Swans and Bucking Horses
- The Pain of Cleaving
- And the Angry God
- Full Tension!
- Adjustments and ...
- Ethical Wonders
- Interlude. Up in the Skyye
- Three. In God We Trust: Economies of Wonder and Philosophies of Debt
- A Treasure Trove
- Twinkling “Excess"
- The Golden Calf
- A Promise of Plenitude
- “Mintingu” and “Minchingu"
- Being Poor
- “Cashacarda?” Philosophies of Debt
- Soiled Money and the Makings of Distrust
- The Limits of Wonder
- Four. Technologies of Wonder
- Animatronic Devi
- Deus Ex Machina
- The New in Bangalore
- The Mythical Garuda-Helicopter
- Envisioning the Sublime
- Drums of Contention
- Capturing Divine Biometrics
- Archiving the Divine
- Technologies of Capture
- FaceTiming God
- Wonder of Wonders
- Five. Timeless Imperatives, Obsolescence, and Salvage
- “Times have Changed"
- The Untimeliness of Modernity
- Avvelle and Ritu
- Slipping Away
- When Wonder Fails
- Time Lords
- Dripping Time
- The Urgency of the Now
- The Future, the Past, and the Immortal Present
- Conclusion. A Place for Radical Hope
- Radical Hope
- Thresholds of Possibility
- Toward an Anthropology of Wonder
- Afterword: The Tenacity of Hope
- Notes
- References
- Index
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