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The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant
contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of
architectural objects and societies to the built environment
changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in
southern Rajasthan—the Ambika Temple in Jagat and the
Ékalingji Temple Complex in Kailaspuri—the author
looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage
structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This
book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these
important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of
antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is
affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as
discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies.
The
Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with
ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as
archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.