Religion Against the Self An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals [Paperback]

This book provides a holistic description of Hinduism, showing how different types of Hinduism form a total or systematic cosmology and repeat crucial values through different symbols. Looking at Tamil religious practices, Isabelle Nabokov reveals that Tamil religion is primarily concerned with transformations of identity and subjectivity, both in this world and in the hereafter.

...an extraordinary study in ritual structure, not just in terms of form or of issues of the relative ubiquity or uniqueness of Tamil practice, but in how these structures serve as catalysts for wrenching expressions of grief, lament, and life-altering loss. --History of Religions