In his presentation, Cort starts with the observation that there are ten carved wooden Jain domestic shrines (ghar derāsar) in American museum collections. This raises a question: how and why did these large objects (most of them are five to seven feet tall, and four to six feet wide) move from their original cultural location as essential components to Jain devotional culture in nineteenth-century Gujarat to become desirable art commodities in twentieth-century U.S. Investigation this question involves a study of changing economic, residential and ritual patterns in India, and concurrent changes in aesthetic taste in the U.S.