Womanhood In The Making: Domestic Ritual And Public Culture In Urban South India

by Mary Hancock

Overview

Womanhood in the Making is an ethnographic study of Brahman women's ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses. Using analyses of both domestic ritual and women's personal narratives, the author investigates the spaces of female agency that ritual practice affords,

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780429982668
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/20/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Mary Hancock is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Acknowledgments, Guide to Pronunciation, Credits, Part 1 Introduction, Prologue: Making and Unmaking the "Great Tradition", Tradition, Modernity, and Their Gendered Places, Domestic Ritual and Its Practice, Feminisms, The Public Culture of Domestic Rituat, About the Book, Part 2 Elite Cultures and Hybrid Modernities, Brokering Culture for the Nation Caste, Culture, and Modernity, Smārta Brahmans in Chennai: Historical Roots of Contemporary "Middleness,", Elite Identity and Postcolonial Cultural Politics, Smārtas As Cultural Brokers, Conclusion, The Moral Etiquette of Everyday Hinduism, Everyday Hinduism, The Domestic Interior, Conclusion: Cultural Logics of Consumption, Part 3 The World in the Home, The Ritualization of Womanhood Ritual Time, The Life Course Imagined, Negotiating Normativity, Temporality and Womanhood, Conclusion: Womanhood's Contradictions, The Uncertain Subject(s) of Womanhood, The Goddess and Her Servants, Improvised Lives, Part 4 The Home in the World, Hinduism and the Spaces of Modernity Hindu Temples and the "Public Sphere," Temples As Contested Public Spaces, Religion and Urban Life, Urban Places and Female Spaces Parvati, Rajalakshmi, Conclusion, Hindu Culture for an Indian Nation Hindutva Goes South, Consenting to What?, Jan Kalyān As a Discourse of Hindu Nationalism, Bringing the Nation Home, Tradition Revisited Navarāttiri in a New Key, The Contest, Ethnographies and Feminisms, Glossary, References, Index

Editorial Reviews

An ethnographic analysis of Tamil Brahman women that demonstrates how tradition and modernity are explicitly and implicitly produced and reworked on the idealized married woman. Case studies of women's religious practices reveal how female subjectivities are invented through ritually mediated relations among and between women and their goddesses. Hancock's (anthropology, U. of California) study is aimed at scholars and students of anthropology, history, religion, and women's and cultural studies . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

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