InMaterial Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes the agency of materiality—the ability of materials to have an effect on both humans and deities—beyond human intentions. Using materials from three regions where Flueckiger conducted extensive fieldwork, she begins with Indian understandings of the agency of ornaments that have the desired effects of protecting women and making them more auspicious. Subsequent chapters bring in examples of materiality that are agentive beyond human intentions, from a south Indian goddess tradition where female guising transforms the aggressive masculinity of men who wear saris, braids, and breasts to the presence of cement images of Ravana in Chhattisgarh, which perform alternative theologies and ideologies to those of dominant textual traditions of the Ramayana epic. Deeply ethnographic and accessibly writtenMaterial Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds expands our understanding of material agency as well as the parameters of religion more broadly.

List of Illustrations
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Agency of Ornaments: Identity, Protection, and Auspiciousness

2. Saris and Turmeric: Performativity of the Material Guise

3. Material Abundance and Material Excess: Creating and Serving Two Goddesses

4. Expanding Shrines, Changing Architecture: From Protector to Protected Goddesses

5. Standing in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains

Afterword: Returning to Material Acts

Glossary of Key Terms
References
Index