Introduction
In the later chapters of this book our central concern will be with Bhaktapur's marked symbolism. The city has, of course, another sort of life that must be described and analyzed in its own terms and whose relations to the particular sort of symbolic order we are concerned with are various. This other order is often dealt with as more real in some sense than the "merely" symbolic order—as one or another kind of "infrastructure." It includes spatial and ecological constraints, aspects of production and distribution, demography, and the like. In still other scholarly traditions "social structure" is given the privilege of a more fundamental reality. These privileged realities are set against what we call "marked symbolism," which is often degraded to epiphenomenal or "expressive" or at best to some modestly supplementary status. We will claim more for Bhaktapur's marked symbolism, but we are not reversing the ideology to argue that the other orders are unimportant or secondary. The interrelations of the realm of marked symbolism and other kinds of order (suffused with their own embedded symbolisms) are diverse. We will touch on some of this in the course of this book. For the reasons urged in chapter 2, however, marked symbolism is our centerpiece.
Bhaktapur's other orders thus become peripheral, but hardly trivial. Their presentation, the subject of this and the following two chapters, is relatively summary, and for this chapter heavily indebted to the work of others.
Figure 1.
Bhaktapur, looking north to the Himalayas.