Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Impressions of a Once and Future World
Moving in Time with Life
A Lifetime of Movement
Deities as Multispecies
Precious Persons of Stone
What is a Shaligram?
Writing an Inconstant World
Into the Foothills
Structure of This Book
A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
Bodies and Landscapes
Living History
An Ethnography of Mobility in Time and Place
Keeping Up with Shaligrams
The Practice of Shaligram Ethnography
Tangled Up in Texts
The View from Ten-Thousand Feet
Constructing a History of Mustang
A Brief Fossil History of the Himalayas
Shaligram Ammonites
Mustang, Historically Speaking
Mustang in the Modern Day
Temples in the Clouds
Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
Introducing the Ritual Landscape
The Gateways of Experience
The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
Tattva Mimamsa, or All Existing Things
Bodily Attachments and the Making of Persons
Tirtha, the Bridge to Everywhere
The Birthplace of Shaligram
Stones as Bodies
Bridging the Gaps
The Shaligram Mythic Complex
The Formation of Shaligrams by Vajra-Kita or the Thunderbolt Worm
The Formation of Shaligrams by River and Mountain
Bouts of Chastity and Other Curses Vishnu has Endured
Channels into the Mainstream
Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
What Does It Mean to Move?
Arriving in Jomsom
Reaching Kagbeni
The View from Muktinath
Approaching the Summit
The Death of Shaligram
Shaligram Online
Paths in Stone
The Lee of the Stone
Touch Stones
Shaligram Stones in an Ammonite World
Secundary Sources
Index