Death in Banaras

Jonathan P. Parry is an anthropologist, and this Cambridge University Press book is his ethnographic fieldwork study of Hindu cremation and ancestor rites as actually performed at Banaras, one of Hinduism's most significant sites for death ritual, set directly against the textual prescriptions for how those rites are supposed to be performed. Its strength is that comparison itself, Parry does not assume textual prescription and lived practice match, and his fieldwork among the funeral specialists and mourners at the cremation ghats documents where they actually diverge. Its limit is that it documents this practice as observed at this one specific, if paradigmatic, site during Parry's own fieldwork period, so a claim about Hindu death ritual as practiced elsewhere in India needs a source addressing that different local context directly.