After returning several times to Banaras, Eck finished her dissertation, a study of its history, mythology and sacred signification for the Hindus. "It's written in a way that is somewhat an introduction to Indian religious culture, its temples Hindu--all 330 million of them," she quips.

Eck says that her interest in the relationship between religion and several issues was shaped some what from her religious childhood. When she had worked on a work camp in Mexico and on an Indian reservation in Montana.

"I also think there's a lot between my love of the landscape in Montana, where we knew all the mountains by nature and interest in symbolic landscape," she says.

Besides the pilgrimages Eck loves the sense of intimacy in Indian culture because of the life in the streets. "Going through the streets of Cambridge, you have no idea what goes on in people's lives," she says.

In Banaras, however, as elsewhere in India people spend a lot of their lives outside their houses, buying and selling in the street and just sitting around with their neighbors, Eck says.

In fact, Eck sometimes finds herself reluctant to return to America "I like India I like living here. I like the personal quality of life and the pace of things," she explains. Coming home, she says she is always shocked by "stuff like the STAR Market."

"You step on the doormat and it opens automatically. And then here's just vast quanties of food so much of the same thing--one whole aisle of pet food and an aisle of cereal and I hate it," Eck says. Contrasting the "gluttony of consumerism" in America with India's ecological ethic that comes in part from a country where resources are scarce.

Furthermore, Eck enjoys the bustle in the streets in India without the West's telephones, Xerox machines, or computers to speed the pace of life.

"In our culture now you don't have to leave your work behind anywhere, there's just this incredible sense that you should always be productive," she says. "I like living in India where I don't have a telephone and the most I have is a mail service."

"I'm not being romantic--it's just a much more humane way to live," she says.

Darryl Catarine'86, who took Foreign Cultures 12 last semester, says that Eck "adds an air of respect to things that would otherwise be abstract. she is a very warm, accessible person...I think a lot of her."