Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within a broader religious and ecological context. Whitmore explores the longer story of this powerful realm of the Hindu god Shiva through a holistic theoretical perspective that integrates phenomenological and systems-based approaches to the study of religion, pilgrimage, place, and ecology. He argues that close attention to places of religious significance offers a model for thinking through connections between ritual, narrative, climate destabilization, tourism, development, and disaster, and he shows how these critical components of human life in the twenty-first century intersect in the human experience of place. “Mountain, Water, Rock, God is the first book-length scholarly treatment of Kedarnath, a pilgrimage destination of pan-Indian importance. Accessible and poetically evocative, the work is timely, at times wrenching, and the scholarship is superior, covering important ground across disciplines. No one is better situated to write this study than Luke Whitmore.” CORINNE DEMPSEY, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Global Studies, Nazareth College LUKE WHITMORE is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point.

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