Religion in the Himalaya takes all sorts of new forms: videos of gods on cell phones, compact disks of Tibetan lama eulogies, photocopied pilgrim guides, and websites for Nepali goddesses, to name just a few. Because they do not mesh cleanly with the scriptural categories by which academics have traditionally attempted to understand religion, such modern phenomena are often brushed under the carpet or touted as oddities. Thankfully, the scholars included in the edited volume Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya have begun the arduous task of filling the lacuna of research on religion in the modern Himalaya. Spanning many nations and religious traditions, the Himalaya is nevertheless defined as its own region of academic interest, and the volume explores both how modernity conditions religion and, conversely, how religion shapes modernity.
Posing modernity as “an era of the consciousness of the new” (p. 7), which is not an objective social...
