William S. Sax in his book Mountain Goddess (1991) and Gavin Smith in Livelihood and Resistance (1989) each offer an anthropological study of a people. Sax considers a group of Hindu villages in the Central Himalaya of North India, while Smith examines peasants living in Peru, a Peru beset by political dissension and resistance. The ethnographies are differently structured and reflect different methodological considerations, but each gives a strong portrait of the people targeted and demonstrates a different aspect of modern anthropological investigation.
Sax is an anthropologist now lecturing at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He considers a specific ritual engaged in every few decades by the people of North India as they carry their regional goddess Nandadevi in a bridal palanquin to her husband Shiva's home in the Himalayan mountains. Sax goes on this journey with the goddess. He begins his journey with a library investigation in which he discovers a book long forgotten that tells about a ritual that took place in Rupkund, a mysterious lake in the Himalayas. The author decides that he has to see this place and travels there. He sees the lake and meets the Nandadevi people, and he has written this book, as he says, "in the hope that readers will come to understand the special power, beauty, and meaning of Nandadevi to the people who worship her, and the many ways in which her cult relates to their daily lives" (5).
The author states that he is presenting an ethnology and that, to do so, it is always necessary to journey to the site and observe the people. He also discusses his views of anthropology and finds that he is now siding with those who see anthropology not as a natural science in search of fixed and immutable laws but as an interpretive science in search of local logics, particular processes, and fluid systems of meaning. He...