Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal.

• Author: Inden, Ronald

By Robert I. Levy with the collaboration of Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. xxii + 829, 14 maps, 36 figures, [8] plates.

This anthropological study of Bhaktapur is certainly one of the densest books on South Asia to have appeared in the U.S. for several years. Taking the title of his book from an idea important to the work of Paul Mus on Cambodia, Levy promises to present to his reader a religion, which, apparently after Clifford Geertz, he equates with a system of symbols, one that helps integrate the life of the city as a mesocosm, a world intermediate to that of individual and the universe. We are supposed to see in this study something representative of South Asia and, even more important, of a type of city, the archaic. The author, not an expert on Nepal or South Asia, having worked previously on Tahiti, relies very heavily on the work of other scholars. He has, to his credit, taken great care to be thorough and accurate and remains modest about his knowledge of Newari, among other things. Expertise is not a problem for Levy's collaborator, the chief Brahman priest of the main temple, that of Taleju. Of course, Levy's success in obtaining an informant of megastar status is not without its problems and I suspect that Levy has been carefully guided in what he does and doesn't say by way of interpretation (Sherpas are also, let it be remembered, Nepalis).

The difficulty is that the thinking that has gone into this study, conducted through interviews from 1973-76, apparently stopped at about the same time. The author apologizes for offering his readers a fading anthropological vision, a last (one hopes) valiant attempt to freeze-dry a cultural species, the traditional or archaic city, and place it in a museum. He nonetheless indulges in this questionable exercise and at great length. Indeed, at one point we are told that "it is possible for some purposes to consider Bhaktapui's pantheon as a sort of museum, a collection of divine South Asian flotsam that has drifted into the Valley" (p. 206). Well, I suppose some might say the same thing about culture in California.... His effort to displace his own theoretical preoccupation onto the Newaris is feeble and not credible. Nor will it do to present his theoretical "orientation" as so many "conceits."

As for the contents...