Description
About the Author
Jon Keune is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He held postdoctoral fellowships in Houston and Goettingen, and he earned a PhD from Columbia University. His research focuses on religion, society, and history in India and with a comparative eye to central Europe and East Asia. As co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network in 2013, he is also deeply involved in collaborative research.
Reviews
Through a detailed study of commensality practices, Keune offers a brilliant historical analysis of the relationship between bhakti traditions and the reality of caste hierarchies. * Anantanand Rambachan, Professor of Religion, Saint Olaf College *
This gem of a book explores the relationship between inclusive religious imagery and the hard realities of social hierarchy. In a tour de force of textual analysis, Jon Keune critically and meticulously compares multiple versions of stories about Eknath, a 16th-century bhakti saint, in plays and movies as well as in traditional texts. Using the narratives as a prism, Keune examines an astonishingly broad spectrum of topics: from the social significance of sharing food to the modern intellectual history of Eknath's region, trends in scholarship on bhakti, and even the very notion of equality itself. * Anne Feldhaus, Professor Emerita, Arizona State University *
Keune brings insight and humor to this study of how sharing food across religious spaces in sacred biographies and devotional texts reveals important considerations about social equality and caste, which he evocatively calls 'the bhakti-caste question'. Spanning archives, literature, manuscripts, visual culture, and ethnography, Keune delves deeply into the possible ethics of devotionalism in India over several centuries, and this book should be of interest to anyone who cares about the politics of power at the intersections of religion, food, and society. * Christian Lee Novetzke, author of The Quotidian Revolution and Professor of South Asia Studies, Comparative Religion, and Global Studies, University of Washington *
It is a useful tool in the classroom to think about the nuances of representation and authorial intention in religious narratives. * Janani Mandayam Comar, Religious Studies Review *
Book Information
ISBN 9780197574836
Author Jon Keune
Format Hardback
Page Count 332
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 680g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 241mm * 28mm