“This excellent book makes a significant contribution to religion and kinship, gender, sexuality, and South Asian studies…. Highly recommended.” - D. A. Chekki (Choice) “This is a beautifully written and theoretically engaged ethnography about a community whose past has been fraught and whose future lies in the balance. It would be appropriate reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of gender, sexuality, kinship, religion, and modernity in India.” - Cecilia Van Hollen (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "We must dwell with, as <i>Given to the Goddess</i> gracefully does, the everyday experiences of devotion, exchange, and one’s social relationship to another-human, nonhuman, or even goddess-that make us, quite simply, kin." - Durba Mitra (GLQ) "Ramberg’s work exemplifies an extraordinary synthesis of animated empiricism and theoretical rigor. It is heartening to mark the arrival of this very important work that signals a critical departure in several ways." - Priyadarshini Vijaisri (Anthropos)
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