This is the version of an article accepted for publication by Berghahn in Advances in Research: Religions and Society: http://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/religion-and-society/religion-and-society-overview.xml Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22751 1 Prospecting in Rajasthan Edward Simpson Edward Simpson is professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of The political biography of an earthquake: Aftermath and amnesia in Gujarat, India (Hurst, 2013). He has recently completed a research project looking at post-colonial change in rural India. Ann Gold’s anthropology is focused on the village of Ghatiyali and its environs in Rajasthan, India. For nearly four decades, she has visited the village, maintained friendships there, and seen things change. She has written on pilgrimage, devotion, gender, sexuality, popular Hinduism, ethno-history and environmentalism. Her methodological approach has been to blend participant observation with the collection and translation of oral traditions of song, story-telling and myth. Early on, she explored death, renunciation and miracles. As time passed, at the most general level, her work developed to become an examination of three broad and intersecting dimensions of meaning: environmental, sociological and cosmological, rather broadly, perhaps, coded as landscape, gender and beauty. In addition to the contribution to a subtle and nuanced understanding of rural Rajasthan, Gold’s work is often cited for the pioneering application of the reflexive turn in the late 1980s and 1990s to ethnographic practice. Later, she developed additional writing techniques and partnerships which allowed her to explore and acknowledge the co-creation of ethnographic material and authority, her long and productive relationship with Bhoju Ram Gujar being particularly notable in this regard. Instead of trying to cover all the topics on which her work touches, in what follows I will discuss the way social change is evoked in and by her anthropology. My focus is thus twofold: (a) to look at the way in which social change is explicitly discussed in her work and (b) to highlight how India might itself have changed by reading across the range of her publications. The second strategy inevitably raises questions about the shifting contours of brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by SOAS Research Online