Ways of Sensing the Sacred: Spirituality and praxis in North India

Abstract

This thesis is about spiritualism in North India and how spirituality is practiced in a town of Tapovan, Rishikesh. Sadhana is a term which refers to a spiritual practice and is at the core of Hinduism and everyday lives of people. This thesis aims to communicate ways of practicing religion, or spirituality, and has its focus on singular experiences of the protagonists and their ways of being in the world. This work is conducted within a theoretical and methodological framework of phenomenology and existential anthropology, which both have deep roots in the study of religious experience. Mircea Eliade´s concept of sacred will be applied in the context of sacred place and time, by the river Ganges. This thesis is complementing a film By the River which the author filmed during her fieldwork. The film captures sacred objects, people, animals and gods who are gathered by the river. This thesis introduces hierophanies, manifestations of sacred, encountered by the river. In the end to argue why film and images complement textual analysis. Religious experiences of others can´t be reached by a researcher and thus the author has included her field notes, to convey how different senses are activated in ethnographic fieldwork.