Mind and Experience in a Hindu City

Abstract

Robert Levy's study of the ritual and religious or- ganization of a city in Nepal offers insights into how the peo- ple of this Hindu community are shaped by cultural context. (Hinduism, selfhood, ritual, Robert Levy) any people may assume that Robert Levy's work ended with the Tahitians, but his work in Nepal pursues themes central to his study of Tahiti. Consistent with his belief in a comparative anthropology, he continued to explore the question of how mind exists in different cultural settings, as these settings exist within different kinds of communities. Relative to Tahiti, in Nepal he finds a different kind of community, one unimagined in the wildest dreams of the South Seas: a Hindu city in the shadow of the Himalayas, a place with a caste hierarchy, an intricate ritual system, and a Tantric tradition, a place where goddesses accept blood sacrifices, and religion organizes much of life. Out of his fieldwork here comes a monumental book, Mesocosm. In it, Levy examines Bhaktapur, the city where he worked in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley, in terms of its religious organization, with a central focus on the cycles of rituals central to the civic order. What Levy offers is a study of Hinduism in an urban incarnation, of urbanism in a Hindu incarnation. The dialectical relationship is crucial. Levy shows us how Hinduism and urbanism constitute each other in a particular city, yet one that represents a historically important class of Hindu communities-those that developed as the royal centers of small Hindu states. Levy also sees Bhaktapur as relevant to the comparative understanding of a wider set of ancient cities, including the Greek cities of antiquity.