By Hugh B. Urban
It is a examine of the Bengali Kartabhaja sect and its position within the broader move of Tantrism, an Indian spiritual stream utilizing purposely surprising sexual language and rituals. city appears heavily on the dating among the increase of the Kartabhajas, who flourished on the flip of the nineteenth century, and the altering fiscal context of colonial Bengal. made from the terrible reduce periods laboring within the marketplaces and factories of Calcutta, the Kartabhajas characterize "the underworld of the imperial city." city exhibits that their esoteric poetry and songs are in reality saturated with the language of and the bazaar, which turns into for them the foremost metaphor used to speak mystery wisdom and mystical teachings.
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Additional resources for The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy and Power in Colonial Bengal
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82 20 INTRODUCTION Symbolic capital is itself the product of a kind of "social alchemy," a process of misrecognition, through which material capital is transformed and "legitimated" in the form of status or distinction. " As such, the dynamics of the social field are determined largely by the strategies and maneuvers of agents in their ongoing competition for these symbolic resources: "Symbolic capital is the product of a struggle in which each agent is both a ruthless competitor and supreme judge.
As Sudipta Sen has shown, the image of the market or bazaar (bajar) was among the most common metaphors used throughout pre- and post-colonial Bengali literature to describe the world as a whole—this mortal realm of constant exchange, buying and selling, haggling and swindling. 89 Moreover, while making use of Bourdieu's economic model, I also hope to criticize and modify it in several important respects. Most significantly, as many critics have argued, Bourdieu consistently tends to belittle and deemphasize the role of agency, awareness, and intentionality in social practice.
86 Second, once it has been converted into this kind of valuable commodity, secret knowledge can serve as a source of "symbolic capital" in Bourdieu's sense, as a form of status and power accumulated by social actors and recognized as "legitimate" in a given social field. As Simmel himself long ago pointed out: "The secret gives one a position of exception ... "87 Secret knowledge thereby functions both as a form of "cultural capi- SECRECY AND SYMBOLIC POWER 21 tal"—special information or "legitimate knowledge"—and as a form of "social capital"—a sign of membership within a community and hierarchical relationships with significant others.