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... more
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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Dedicated to a South Indian goddess, devadasis are priests in a healing cult, whose nonconjugal sexuality has been designated 'prostitution'... more
Dedicated to a South Indian goddess, devadasis are priests in a healing cult, whose nonconjugal sexuality has been designated 'prostitution' and subjected to eradication by the state. Drawing on ethnographic research, I consider two ways in which they cross the threshold of the clinic, as 'vectors of disease' and as sex worker peer educators, in order to think about the bio-politics of citizenship in postcolonial India. If biopolitical citizenship describes the way the state takes hold of their bodies, dedication describes how their bodies are claimed by the Devi Yellamma. I juxtapose these different ways of embodying power as a means to mark the limits of secular social scientific terms of recognition.
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Patterns of kin-making among devadasis in northern Karnataka pose problems for anthropological charting of kinship and for state projects of family normalization. Given to the goddess Yellamma by her family in a rite of marriage, a... more
Patterns of kin-making among devadasis in northern Karnataka pose problems for anthropological charting of kinship and for state projects of family normalization. Given to the goddess Yellamma by her family in a rite of marriage, a devadasi becomes a person who is both a woman and a son. Such a person cannot be mapped within a structuralist calculus of kin in which every position is always already gendered. I elaborate kin-making as a technology for producing gender and value in persons who can inhabit, but may confound, alignments between sex, gender, and kin position that have been smuggled into the anthropological project as kinship.
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In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its... more
In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of...
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What are the possibilities of being out of sync with the linear time of historical progress? What are the consequences? To be queer is to be out of step with the reproductive rhythm of sexual maturation, conjugal matrimony, and... more
What are the possibilities of being out of sync with the linear time of historical progress? What are the consequences? To be queer is to be out of step with the reproductive rhythm of sexual maturation, conjugal matrimony, and patri-lineal descent. To be Dalit, or a member of a community formerly designated as " untouchable, " is to be backward, not yet modern. The question I am interested in here is twofold: How is asynchronicity inhabited by those deemed backward? 1 How might the answer to this question speak to the geopolitics of queer theory and the sexual politics of Dalit studies?
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Patterns of kin-making among devadasis in northern Karnataka pose problems for anthropological charting of kinship and for state projects of family normalization. Given to the goddess Yellamma by her family in a rite of marriage, a... more
Patterns of kin-making among devadasis in northern Karnataka pose problems for anthropological charting of kinship and for state projects of family normalization. Given to the goddess Yellamma by her family in a rite of marriage, a devadasi becomes a person who is both a woman and a son. Such a person cannot be mapped within a structuralist calculus of kin in which every position is always already gendered. I elaborate kin-making as a technology for producing gender and value in persons who can inhabit, but may confound, alignments between sex, gender, and kin position that have been smuggled into the anthropological project as kinship.
Research Interests:
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This paper offers an ethnography of the medicalization of matted locks of hair (jade) worn by female ecstatics in a South Indian devi (goddess) cult. These jade are taken by devotees of the devi Yellamma to be a manifestation of her... more
This paper offers an ethnography of the medicalization of matted locks of hair (jade) worn by female ecstatics in a South Indian devi (goddess) cult. These jade are taken by devotees of the devi Yellamma to be a manifestation of her presence in the bodies of women who enter possession states and give oracles. At her temples across the central Deccan Plateau, Yellamma women can be seen wearing heavy locks of matted hair anointed with turmeric, the color and healing properties of which are identified with this devi. Under a recent government-sponsored campaign, reformers cut jade and hand out packets of shampoo as a means of reforming the extended and illicit sexuality of these women. Associations between sexuality and hair practices have long preoccupied anthropologists interested in the relationship between the body and culture. In this paper, I draw on this literature and more than 2 years of field research to consider the encounter between biomedical and Shakta epistemologies of the body dramatized in these jade cutting campaigns. This effort to remake the body as a fit site and sign of modernity elaborates the postcolonial politics of sexuality, gender and religiosity in India.