
Contents
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On the Occasion of the Blessed Installation of the Lord On the Occasion of the Blessed Installation of the Lord
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Wealth and Holy Poverty Wealth and Holy Poverty
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Ideology Ideology
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A Note on Method A Note on Method
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Cite
Extract
On the Occasion of the Blessed Installation of the Lord
I arrived with my wife Cynthia in Ahmedabad on an evening in late August 1985, planning to spend the next two years doing fieldwork in Gujarat for a doctoral dissertation on the Jains. I had done some preliminary fieldwork on the Jains as an undergraduate a decade earlier in Banaras and then briefly in Patan earlier in my graduate career. I had done extensive reading of primary and secondary sources on Jainism. I had a serviceable knowledge of the basics of Jain philosophy and orthopraxy. The first intense immersion in fieldwork in Ahmedabad showed me clearly how little I knew, how problematic what I did know was, and set the stage for questions I am still asking.
Almost immediately upon arrival in Ahmedabad, I met with Thomas Zwicker, an anthropology graduate student from the University of Pennsylvania who had been in Gujarat for the previous nine months, and with whom I had been in correspondence. He said that he was interested in researching the rites surrounding the installation of an image in a new temple, rites collectively known as pratiṣṭhā. Since rituals were to be a centerpiece of my research, I was of course interested, and he suggested we work together. A few days later, over lunch with a Jain friend, we mentioned our interest in observing a pratiṣṭhā. He recalled seeing an announcement of one in that morning's newspaper. We stopped by the new temple on our way back to the university, and there met several men who gave us the complete program for the nine‐day festival, explained to us which events had already occurred, and invited us to return the following morning.
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