[URBANTH-L] NEW BOOK: In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City and Memory in a Global Religious Movement, by Smriti Srinivas

[Angela Jancius]

Dear All,

You may be interested the below announcement of SUNTA 
member, Smriti Srinivas', new book, _In the Presence of Sai Baba_.
  - AJ

NEW BOOK!

"In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City and Memory in a Global Religious 
Movement" by Smriti Srinivas

South Asian paperback (2008) published by Orient Longman (Hyderabad), 
https://www.orientlongman.com   

Original Hardback (2008) published by Brill (Leiden/Boston) in the Numen 
Book Series: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=74&mcid=5&pid=27711

The Sai Baba movement, centered on the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (b. 
1926), today attracts a global following from Japan to South Africa. 
Regarded as a divine incarnation, Sathya Sai Baba traces his genealogy to 
Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918), a mendicant in colonial India identified with 
various Sufi and devotional traditions. The movement, thus, has "roots" 
in Shirdi Sai Baba but as it globalizes, it has developed conjunctions 
with other religious traditions, New Religious Movements, and New Age 
ideas. This book offers an account of the Sai Baba movement as a pathway 
for charting the varied cartographies, sensory formations, and cultural 
memories implicated in urbanization and globalization. It traverses the 
terrain between social theories for the study of religion and cities - 
themselves a product of modernity- and the radical, creative, and 
unexpected modernity of contemporary religious movements. It is based on 
ethnographic research carried out in India, Kenya, and the United States 
of America.

SMRITI SRINIVAS is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of 
California, Davis. She is the author of The Mouths of People, the Voice 
of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (1998), 
and Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India's High-
Tech City (2001). Her research interests are in urban cultures, social 
memory, cultures of the body, and religion.