Poetics of Conduct

Combining scholarly imagination, ethnographic acumen, and literary flair, Leela Prasad portrays a pilgrimage town and its memorable residents to offer a compelling experience-centered approach to ethics. -- Kirin Narayan, author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative as Hindu Religious Teaching This is perhaps the only book that moves our attention from the texts of the Dharmashastras to the practice of dharma in the actual lives of Hindu families. Prasad radically revises our concept of Shastra by presenting a dialectical relationship between texts and lives. Her book is beautifully written with deep erudition coupled with genuine understanding. -- Velcheru Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin

Presenting everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking, this book shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. It builds on the author's research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India.Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to "text," "moral authority," and "community." Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of "theory" itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.