Appropriately for a book about poetics, this work achieves a sense of the almost seamless moral universe encompassing a Kannada-speaking community (Sringeri) and its Sanskritic theological underpinnings through a poetics of incantation. The nonspecialist reader is cast beguilingly adrift in an undulating recitation of theological and moral language, with the exegesis and theoretical framework embedded in lovingly, reflexively ethnographic descriptions that alternate with historically and philologically intricate excursions into Hindu theology and ethics. The technical sense of poetics, while clearly not confused here (as so often happens) with the art form of poetry, emerges sensually from the book's narrative structure rather than exegetically from a matching attempt at formal theorizing. Perhaps this is a deliberate strategy intended to foreground the social actors' own conceptual framings. Leela Prasad belongs to a growing group of anthropologists who are not only willing to credit their informants with a capacity for building and using...
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