Description
Against The Grain is a visual presentation on reality and myth, on material culture and much more. The Traditions depicted herein, embedded in complex webs of cults, languages and enacted through the medium of ritual practices, are deeply rooted in science and spirituality. The ritual dimensions, born out of devotional attitudes towards a diverse host of deities, forces of nature, asceticism, life and death, society and its rejection, forms the core of this book. Here, myths, beliefs and ritual-objects are derived and reformulated from a multitude of over-lapping traditions in a seamlessly fluid relationship between material culture and what has been inscribed in the texts from within these cultures. This book, a multi-modal ethnographic undertaking, walks its audience through the myths and rites that attempt to grasp the meaning of nature and its ontological realities within our own space and time -- in realms where ordinary human beings, gods, animals, objects spirits and forces of nature communion with one another through performative ritual practices.
