Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism
Middle-Class Dharma is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one.

Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate—that is, what is dharmic—as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new dharmic boundaries and religious selfhoods in the middle classes. Such transitions can be as joyful as they are difficult and disorienting.

Middle-Class Dharma explores how contemporary Hindu women's everyday practices reimagine and reshape Hindu traditions. By developing dharma as an analytical category and class as a dharmic category, Ortegren pushes for expanding definitions of religion in academia, both within and beyond the study of Hinduism in South Asia.
1144107758
Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism
Middle-Class Dharma is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one.

Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate—that is, what is dharmic—as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new dharmic boundaries and religious selfhoods in the middle classes. Such transitions can be as joyful as they are difficult and disorienting.

Middle-Class Dharma explores how contemporary Hindu women's everyday practices reimagine and reshape Hindu traditions. By developing dharma as an analytical category and class as a dharmic category, Ortegren pushes for expanding definitions of religion in academia, both within and beyond the study of Hinduism in South Asia.
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Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism

Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism

by Jennifer D. Ortegren
Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism

Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism

by Jennifer D. Ortegren

Hardcover

$110.00 
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Overview

Middle-Class Dharma is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one.

Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate—that is, what is dharmic—as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new dharmic boundaries and religious selfhoods in the middle classes. Such transitions can be as joyful as they are difficult and disorienting.

Middle-Class Dharma explores how contemporary Hindu women's everyday practices reimagine and reshape Hindu traditions. By developing dharma as an analytical category and class as a dharmic category, Ortegren pushes for expanding definitions of religion in academia, both within and beyond the study of Hinduism in South Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780197530795
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 04/28/2023
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 9.31(w) x 6.36(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

Jennifer D. Ortegren is Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College. She specializes in the ethnographic study of religions in contemporary South Asia, particularly Hinduism and Islam, with a focus on women, ritual, and class, as well as shifting relationships between Hindu and Muslim neighbors.

Table of Contents

List of Figures/Captions
Acknowledgments
Notes on Transliteration
"A Cast of Characters"

Introduction: Defining Middle-Class Dharma
1. Arranging Marriage, Negotiating Dharma
2. Solah Somwar and Conjugal Dharma
3. Karva Chauth and the Dharma of Neighbors
4. Ganesha Chaturthi and the Boundaries of Dharma
5. Dharma and Discomfort During Navaratri
6. New Neighborhood, New Dharma
Conclusion: Drawing on Dharma to Expand our Research and Teaching

Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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