Martin Gaenszle Books

This study focuses on various genres of ritual speech among the Mewahang Rai, all of which make use of a distinct ritual language. The main objective is to situate the oral ritual texts in their ethnographic context. Combining a textual with a cultural approach, the author discusses the indigenous concept of tradition, the rhetorical and poetic features of ritual speech genres, and the discursive universe constructed through the texts. On the theoretical level, the book contributes to recent debates about ritualization and performance, and to discussions in linguistic anthropology concerning the notions of formality, indexicality, entextualization and contextualization.

The city of Banaras is widely known as a unique, impressive and particularly ancient historical place. But for many it is above all a universal, cosmic, and in a sense timeless sacred space. Both of these seemingly contrasting depictions contribute to how the city is experienced by its inhabitants or visitors, and there is a great variety of sometimes competing views: Kasi the Luminous, the ancient Crossing, the city of Death, the place of Hindu-Muslim encounter and syncretism, the cosmopolitan centre of learning, etc. The present volume deals with the multiple ways this urban site is visualized, imagined, and culturally represented by different actors and groups. The forms of visualizations are manifold and include buildings, paintings, drawings, panoramas, photographs, traditional and modern maps, as well as verbal and mental images. The major focus will thus be on visual media, which are of special significance for the representation of space. But this cannot be divorced from other forms of expressions which are part of the local life-world (“Lebenswelt”). The contributions look at local as well as exogenous constructions of the rich topography of Kasi and show that these imaginations and constructions are not static but always embedded in social and cultural practices of representation, often contested and never complete.