Who and what are marriage and sex for? Whose practices and which ways of talking to god can count as religion? Lucinda Ramberg considers these questions based upon two years of ethnographic research on an ongoing South Indian practice of dedication in which girls, and sometimes boys, are married to a goddess. Called devadasis, or jogatis, those dedicated become female and male women who conduct the rites of the goddess outside the walls of her main temple and transact in sex outside the bounds of conjugal matrimony. Marriage to the goddess, as well as the rites that the dedication ceremony authorizes jogatis to perform, have long been seen as illegitimate and criminalized. Kinship with the goddess is productive for the families who dedicate their children, Ramberg argues, and yet it cannot conform to modern conceptions of gender, family, or religion. This nonconformity, she suggests, speaks to the limitations of modern categories, as well as to the possibilities of relations—between and among humans and deities—that exceed such categories.
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Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Gods, Gifts, Trouble 1 Part I. Gods 1. Yellamma and Her Sisters: Kinship among Goddesses and Others 39 2. Yellamma, Her Wives, and the Question of Religion 71 Part II. Gifts 3. Tantra, Shakta, Yellamma 113 4. The Giving of Daughters: Sexual Economy, Sexual Agency, and the "Traffic" in Women 142 Part III. Trouble 5. Kinship Trouble 181 6. Troubling Kinship 213 Notes 223 Glossary 247 Bibliography 251 Index 270
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“This excellent book makes a significant contribution to religion and kinship, gender, sexuality, and South Asian studies…. Highly recommended.”
"Lucinda Ramberg has written a book that charts new conceptual terrain in the anthropology of South Asia. Given to the Goddess indicts both liberal reformism and secular progressivism for their investment in an all too-easy politics of gender that occludes the power (and experience) of stigmatized sexuality. Instead, Ramberg shows how practices coded as anachronistic, or coerced, constitute the conditions of possibility for capacious, non-individuated accounts of sexed agency. This is an exquisite ethnography of the queer embodiments and ritual imaginaries by which women come to be 'given to the goddess.'"
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822357247
Publisert
2014-09-17
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
386 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Lucinda Ramberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.