ABSTRACT
What could be more ordinary than houses and the straightforward mundane life that people live within them? Yet, the themes of this book are that underlying the ordinariness of houses are rich and complex ideas about the cosmos and that commonplace domestic activities are simultaneously cosmogenic acts of building the cosmos and revelatory acts of knowing its fundamental principles. I explore these themes through an ethnography about the houses of high caste Hindus of Nepal portraying their lifeworld as they live it, experience it and come to know its sacred cosmos through the activities they carry out in the taken-for-granted spaces of their dwellings (ghar).1 Rather than just a backdrop to their everyday lives (Wilson 1988), Nepali houses are maṇḍalas (mystical diagrams) ‘not just in daily life but also in the imagination’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1996:64). They are materially built, ritually constructed and practically configured as functional spaces for domestic life and as sacred spaces that reiterate the nature of the cosmos so that living in these domestic mandalas is productive of knowledge of the cosmos they represent. As mandalas, houses are a context and a medium for daily life and for embodied knowledge of the cosmos in which that lifeworld is given meaning and significance.
