Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town

Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town

by Leela Prasad (Author)

Synopsis

Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to text, moral authority, and community. Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of theory itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.

$44.63

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 05 Jan 2007

ISBN 10: 0231139217
ISBN 13: 9780231139212
Book Overview: Combining scholarly imagination, ethnographic acumen, and literary flair, Leela Prasad portrays a pilgrimage town and its memorable residents to offer a compelling experience-centered approach to ethics. -- Kirin Narayan, author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative as Hindu Religious Teaching This is perhaps the only book that moves our attention from the texts of the Dharmashastras to the practice of dharma in the actual lives of Hindu families. Prasad radically revises our concept of Shastra by presenting a dialectical relationship between texts and lives. Her book is beautifully written with deep erudition coupled with genuine understanding. -- Velcheru Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin

Media Reviews
Her detailed, emphatic, and beautiful ethnography draws the reader into a consideration of issues that textual scholars struggle to make relevant. -- Donald R. Davis, Jr. Journal of the American Oriental Society
Author Bio
Leela Prasad is assistant professor of practical ethics and Indian religions at Duke University. She has edited Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience and coedited Gender and Story in South India. Her book in progress, Annotating Pastimes, is a study of folktale collecting in colonial India.