The Hegemony of Heritage: Ritual and the Record in Stone

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how architectural objects and societies' relationship to the built environment change over time. Using the pairing of two living medieval monuments in Southern Rajasthan-the Ambika Temple in Jagat, Rajasthan and the Ekalingji Temple Complex in Kailaspuri-the author underscores many aspects of practice, and avoids focusing simply on their divergent sectarian affiliations or patronage structures. This book offers new and extremely valuable questions about these important monuments such as the entangled politics of antiquity and whether a monument's ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary, or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage engages theoretical constructs with the richness of ethnographic description and asks us to rethink notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.