Aftab Singh Jassal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and an Affiliate Faculty in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego. He previously taught at Duke and Colgate University. He received his PhD in West and South Asian Religions from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University.
His book, Gods in the World: Place-making and Healing in the Himalayas is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices in the north Indian, Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, a region facing the combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva. The book examines how these socioeconomic and political transformations are experienced and refracted through human-divine relations. Gods in the World explores the moral, affective, and ontological textures of human-divine relations, how deities and other supernatural agents are made real or present in ritual encounters through acts of “place-making,” and how divinities come to matter in the lives of ordinary people. Working across multiple sites and scales, the book unfolds place-making as a healing practice that repairs and restores relations between divinities and humans, showing how significant those relations are for health, environment, and political life. By making place for divinities as key social and political actors, the book shows how they actively participate and intervene in matters of personal and collective importance in tangible ways.
Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with professional ritual healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, lay devotees—many of whom belong to Dalit communities—as well as with caste-privileged temple functionaries, the book offers a striking study of contemporary Hinduism that demonstrates its heterogenous, internally contested character. In bringing fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender together with enduring questions in the anthropology of religion about the efficacy of ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, the book contributes critical insights into everyday Hinduism as a terrain of negotiation and struggle.
Read More