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The volume underscores the manner in which the religious cultures of goddesses are reflexes of larger social processes occurring historically in local contexts and illustrates transformations in how these same goddesses are understood when they migrate from indigenous social and cultural contexts to destinations with their devotees.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Goddesses That Dwell On Earth: A Folk Paradigm of Divine Female Multiplicity
Brenda Beck
Chapter 2: Constructing Goddess Worship: Colonial Ethnographic and Public Health Discourses in South India
Perundevi Srinivasan
Chapter 3: From Local Goddess to Locale Goddess: Karumariamman as Divine Mother at a North American Hindu Temple
Tracy Pintchman
Chapter 4: An Indentured Goddess: Displacement of a Village Deity from Colonial India to Ceylon
Sasi Kumar Balasundaram
Chapter 5: Creating Realities, Communicating Dreams, Constructing Temple Lore: Anklets for the Goddess' feet at Thirumeeyachur
Vasudha Narayanan
Chapter 6: Traveling Goddess- A Study of Uppalamma in Andhra Pradesh
Sree Padma
Chapter 7: The Leap of the Limping Goddess: Aai Khodiyar of Gujarat
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt
Chapter 8: Tantric Visions, Local Manifestations: The Cult Centre of Chinnamasta at Rajrappa, Jharkhand
R. Mahalakshmi
Chapter 9: The Goddess on the Hill: The (Re)invention of a local goddess as C¿mun¿d¿¿
Caleb Simmons
Chapter 10: Communicating the Local Discursively: Devi, the Divine feminine as a Contemporary Symbol for Grassroots Feminist Politics
Priya Kapoor
About the author
Sree Padma is executive director of the Inter-Collegiate Sri Lanka Education (ISLE) Program and research assistant professor in Asian studies at Bowdoin College.
Summary
The volume underscores the manner in which the religious cultures of goddesses are reflexes of larger social processes occurring historically in local contexts and illustrates transformations in how these same goddesses are understood when they migrate from indigenous social and cultural contexts to destinations with their devotees.
