Loving Stones

Abstract

Abstract Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan is based on ethnographic and textual research with two major objectives. First, it is a study of the conceptions of and worshipful interactions with Mount Govardhan, a sacred mountain located in the Braj region of north-central India that has for centuries been considered an embodied form of Krishna. In this capacity it provides detailed information about the rich religious world associated with Mount Govardhan, much of which has not been available in previous scholarly literature. It is often said in that Mount Govardhan “makes the impossible possible” for devoted worshipers. This investigation includes an examination of the perplexing paradox of an infinite god embodied in finite form, wherein each particular form is non-different from the unlimited. Second, it aims to address the challenge of interpreting something as radically different as the worship of a mountain and its stones for a culture in which this practice is quite alien. This challenge involves exploration of interpretive strategies that aspire to make the incomprehensible understandable, and engages in theoretical considerations of incongruity, inconceivability, and like realms of the impossible. This aspect of the book includes critical consideration of the place and history of the pejorative concept of idolatry (and secondarily, its twin, anthropomorphism) in the comparative study of religions. Accordingly, the second aim aspires to use the worship of Mount Govardhan as a site to explore ways in which scholars engaged in the difficult work of representing other cultures struggle to “make the impossible possible.”

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