Choice Review

Babb rightly belongs in the company of the most interesting American interpreters of "foreign cultures." His two earlier book-length ethnographies--The Divine Hierarchy (1975) and Redemptive Encounters (1986)--have been "good reads" as well as sound and thought-provoking analyses of several communities of followers of 20th-century popular Hinduism. In Absent Lord he tops himself. He opens the Shvetaambar Jain cosmos to the reader and makes it palpable by careful attention to rituals of the Jain religion. Babb begins his book with a seemingly paradoxical and yet irresistible question: "What does it mean to worship beings that one believes are completely indifferent to, and entirely beyond the reach of, any form of worship whatsoever?" The question takes hold like a koan and pulls one right into the study, which rapidly moves forward by means of careful description, comparative and structural analysis, and telling anecdotes from fieldwork in Jaipur and elsewhere. Since the highest ideals of Jainism are derived by example from the lives of great world-renouncing ascetics, an interpreter must work out how their example informs the patterns of temple worship, ethical values, and spiritual hopes that currently exist within a largely urban, commercial, and lay community of contemporary Jains. Babb's study richly complements those by Paul Dundas and especially James Laidlaw. Map, photographs, notes, glossary. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty. G. R. Thursby University of Florida