This book's effortless balance of personal anecdotes; translations from Sanskrit, colonial, and local texts; and thick descriptions of rituals devoted to the goddess places it among the best of contemporary ethnographic work.
Ehud Halperin teaches at Tel Aviv University. He earned his PhD in South Asian Religions from Columbia University in 2012. He specializes in the study of Himalayan Hinduism and the ways in which religious belief, practice, narrative, social order, and capitalist modernity intertwine in everyday life in the region, especially in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Halperin's work concerns diverse issues, such as Indian goddesses, Hindu ritual and sacrifice, material religion and agency of divinities, religion and ecology, and lived Hinduism.