Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“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
Given to the Goddess 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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
