08-01-2006, 03:35 AM
Hi All,
I am looking for more information on the following article. If you have or can access the full article, please tell me if you can give me access to it. I will pay any costs. I am also interested in any details about these traditions or rituals in Andhra Pradesh today. If you have such information, or know anybody who has such info, please get back to me.
Here is a link to the following: Click here.
<b>The Vocation of Vedam, the Selection of Srautam: Vedic Brahmans in Coastal Andhra</b>
<i>David M. Knipe, University of Wisconsin, Madison</i>
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This paper is based on fieldwork in the Godavari River Delta of coastal Andhra since 1980, for periods of one to eight months during ten of the last sixteen years. The focus has been life histories of Vaidika Brahmans, a hereditary elite devoted from childhood to learning, maintaining and teaching vedam (the Vedas) and, for a select few, going on to perform the great soma and other sacrifices in their regional tradition of srautam. The site is two adjacent village agraharams and a nearby town that have housed five ahitagnis, i.e. somayajis (sacrificers of soma) who have at the peaks of their careers maintained the sacred fires. One ahitagni is deceased (1993 at age 89); the others are now in their seventies and eighties. Some have been unsuccessful at teaching a single son. Others have taught not only sons but also grandsons through the complete Taittiriya course of vedam in a rigorous instructional process of eight to fifteen years beginning at age five to seven. At this date, although several contemplate the step, no one vedam-certified in either the middle or younger generation has set the fires, performed the agnistoma, and thereby advanced the srautam.
The descriptive side of this paper will focus on the complex features of late twentieth-century agraharam life that lie behind the changing educational patterns of life "in the Vedas," as the Telugu phrase has it. The interpretive and predictive side of the paper will assess the many-sided ways in which this local, oral, ancient, venerable and vulnerable Vedic tradition looks at itself and at the modern world that now imposes radical transformations.<!--c2--><!--ec2-->
I am looking for more information on the following article. If you have or can access the full article, please tell me if you can give me access to it. I will pay any costs. I am also interested in any details about these traditions or rituals in Andhra Pradesh today. If you have such information, or know anybody who has such info, please get back to me.
Here is a link to the following: Click here.
<b>The Vocation of Vedam, the Selection of Srautam: Vedic Brahmans in Coastal Andhra</b>
<i>David M. Knipe, University of Wisconsin, Madison</i>
<!--c1-->CODE<!--ec1-->
This paper is based on fieldwork in the Godavari River Delta of coastal Andhra since 1980, for periods of one to eight months during ten of the last sixteen years. The focus has been life histories of Vaidika Brahmans, a hereditary elite devoted from childhood to learning, maintaining and teaching vedam (the Vedas) and, for a select few, going on to perform the great soma and other sacrifices in their regional tradition of srautam. The site is two adjacent village agraharams and a nearby town that have housed five ahitagnis, i.e. somayajis (sacrificers of soma) who have at the peaks of their careers maintained the sacred fires. One ahitagni is deceased (1993 at age 89); the others are now in their seventies and eighties. Some have been unsuccessful at teaching a single son. Others have taught not only sons but also grandsons through the complete Taittiriya course of vedam in a rigorous instructional process of eight to fifteen years beginning at age five to seven. At this date, although several contemplate the step, no one vedam-certified in either the middle or younger generation has set the fires, performed the agnistoma, and thereby advanced the srautam.
The descriptive side of this paper will focus on the complex features of late twentieth-century agraharam life that lie behind the changing educational patterns of life "in the Vedas," as the Telugu phrase has it. The interpretive and predictive side of the paper will assess the many-sided ways in which this local, oral, ancient, venerable and vulnerable Vedic tradition looks at itself and at the modern world that now imposes radical transformations.<!--c2--><!--ec2-->