In this comprehensive analysis of South Indian village Hinduism, Isabelle Nabokov shows that a wide spectrum of Tamil rituals effects transformations of identity through similar processual and symbolic operations. She reveals that such operations may lead participants to adopt personalities which are at odds with themselves.

The Encounter Never Ends offers a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge through the analysis of Tamil ritual practice in a South Indian village. Isabelle Clark-Deces revisits field notes taken more than fifteen years earlier, and reveals what she intended when she took the notes, what she came to understand and record, and why she proceeded to ignore her ethnography until recently. Returning to these notes with fresh eyes and matured experience, Clark-Deces gains insight into Tamil rural society that complicates anthropological analyses of...