Search Results (4)

This paper examines a 12th-century Virupaksha temple through the reconstruction and exploration of space, movement, devotee corporeal experiences, and the use of natural landscape microtopographic features in monument design. The Mula Virupaksha Temple presents a dramatic change in the previously non-imperial sacred landscape in the Hemakuta Hill area at Hampi (Bellary District, Karnataka). With its construction, Hampi transitioned from a local Shaiva pilgrimage center dedicated to the river goddess Pampa and her counterpart Bhairava to a popular Shaiva pilgrimage and cult center of the newly imported god, Virupaksha. The Mula Virupaksha Temple presents a design thoroughly novel to the area that ushered in a period of sophisticated and unprecedented architectural planning at the site which incorporated natural landscape features for the management and cultivation of devotee ritual corporeal experiences. Virupaksha, his patrons, and associated artisans brought significant cultic change and architectural innovation that took root and persisted into the imperial Vijayanagara period, from the mid-14th to late 16th centuries. The present paper relies on a digital methodology developed to identify ritual changes in early medieval South Asian sacred spaces, focusing on time-sensitive maps created through a geographic information system (GIS), and coupled with the immersive panoramic capabilities of Google Street View (GSV) for a ground-based investigation of the non-ephemeral pilgrimage landscape features. Full article

This article aims to study how a movement aimed at the assertion of indigenous religiosity in India has resulted in the empowerment of the women who participate in it. As part of the movement, devotees of the indigenous Earth Goddess, who are mostly indigenous women, experience possession trances in sacred natural sites which they have started visiting regularly. The movement aims to assert indigenous religiosity in India and to emphasize how it is different from Hinduism—as a result the ecological articulations of indigenous religiosity have intensified. The movement has a strong political character and it explicitly demands that indigenous Indian religiosity should be officially recognized by the inclusion of a new category for it in the Indian census. By way of their participation in this movement, indigenous Indian women are becoming figures of religious authority, overturning cultural taboos pertaining to their societal and religious roles, and are also becoming empowered to initiate ecological conservation and restoration efforts. Full article

Cow shelters (gaushalas) are unique traditional institutions in India, where aged, infertile, diseased, rescued, and abandoned cows are sheltered for the rest of their life, until they die of natural causes. These institutions owe their existence to the reverence for the cow as a holy mother goddess for Hindus, the majority religion in India. There is a religious and legal prohibition on cow slaughter in most Indian states. A cross-sectional study was conducted to assess the welfare of cows in these shelters, which included the development of a welfare assessment protocol, based on direct animal-based measurements, indirect resource-based assessments, and description of the herd characteristics by the manager. A total of 54 cow shelters in 6 states of India were studied and 1620 animals were clinically examined, based on 37 health, welfare, and behavior parameters. Thirty resources provided to the animals, including housing, flooring, feeding, watering, ease of movement, cleanliness of facilities, lighting, temperature, humidity, and noise levels in the sheds were measured. The study showed that the shelters contained mostly non-lactating cows, with a mean age of 11 years. The primary welfare problems appeared to be different to those in Western countries, as the major issues found in the shelters were facility-related—the low space allowance per cow, poor quality of the floors, little freedom of movement, and a lack of pasture grazing. Very few cows were recorded as lame, but about one half had carpal joint hair loss and swelling, and slightly less had lesions from interacting with shelter furniture. Some shelters also had compromised biosecurity and risks of zoonosis. These issues need to be addressed to aid in ensuring the acceptability of these institutions to the public. This welfare assessment protocol aims to address the welfare issues and problems in the shelters, by providing feedback for improvement to the stakeholders. Full article

The last three decades have witnessed a significant increase in the academic interest in the Beat Generation. No longer seen as “know-nothing bohemians” (Podhoretz 1958), scholars have extended the scope of Beat studies, either by generating renewed interest in canonical authors, by expanding the understanding of what Beat means, or by broadening the aesthetic or theoretical lens through which we read Beat writers and poets. Among these, the transnational perspective on Beat writing has sparked careful re-examinations of Beat authors and their works that seek to recognize, among other things, the impact that transnational cultures and literatures have had on Beat writers. Diane di Prima’s long poem Loba (Di Prima 1998), a feminist epic the poet started writing in the early 1970s, draws on a vast array of transnational texts and influences. Most notoriously, di Prima works with mythological and religious texts to revise and challenge the representation of women throughout history. This paper explores di Prima’s particular use of world narratives in light of a feminist poetics and politics of revision. Through the example of “Eve” and the “Virgin Mary”, two of the many female characters whose textual representation is challenged in Loba, the first part of the paper considers di Prima’s use of gnostic and Christian discourses and their impact on her feminist politics of revision. The second part of the paper situates Loba in the specific context of Second-Wave feminism and the rise of Goddess Movement feminist groups. Drawing from the previous analysis, this part reevaluates di Prima’s collection in light of the essentialist debate that analyzes the texts arising from this tradition as naïve and apolitical. Full article