ETHNOGRAPHY AND PERSONHOOD: Notes from the Field

This volume grows out of a thematic seminar on “Pilgrimage, Art, and Ritual: Ethnography and Art History” sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and a subsequent cross-disciplinary field study, “Continuities of Religious Patronage: Pilgrimage Temples in Western India”, undertaken with support from the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Interpretive Research Program and affiliation with the Institute for Rajasthan Studies, Jaipur. The seminar brought together significant practitioners from several disciplines to talk about issues of carrying out fieldwork in India, speaking in personal voices about the process of using one’s body and mind as a filter for direct experience.

The contributions by Anne Feldhaus, Ann Grodzins Gold, and Richard Davis reflect their explorations not only of the culture studied but of the process of study itself. Irene J. Winter explores a methodology for using ethnographic insights from the ritual traditions of India to enliven objects from her own field, the ancient Near East.

The essays by Lawrence A. Babb, John E. Cort, and Michael W. Meister, focusing on four pilgrimage temples in Rajasthan, provide preliminary explorations of the multiplicity of truths these temples in their social context represent.