"Gutschow has lived for three years among a group of nuns in the Indian Himalayas, collecting their stories and studying their lives. Her book offers an ethnography of Buddhist monastic culture from the perspective of nuns. She depicts a gender hierarchy where monks direct and nuns serve in the very fields and houses blessed by monastic rites. looking at historical social patterns of patronage as well as recent cultural shifts in feminism, globalism, and politics, she investigates the changing balance of power between monks and nuns. Most recently, nuns have begun to engage in everyday acts of resistance and subversion to contest the predominant power of monks."