Promising Rituals: Gender and Performativity in Eastern India [Paperback]

List of Plates. List of Maps. Glossary. Notes on Transcription. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Doing Gender in Southern Orissa 1. Tasting Ritual: How to Fast for a Good Husband 2. Shared Pain  Shared Joy: On Ritual Agency and Composition 3. Periodically Untouchable: Female Bodies and the Performance of Impurity 4. Contested Bodies: Deity Possession as a Religious Idiom 5. (Re-) Calling the Goddess: The Emergence of Divine Presence 6. Nocturnal Encounters: Living Mothers and Divine Daughters 7. Divine Play or Subversive Comedy? On Costuming, Gender and Transgression 8. The Limitations of Ritual: Female Politics and the Public. Afterword: Promising Rituals. Bibliography. About the Author. Index

This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Th
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, local processions, and the role of female ritual specialists.

The study uses the premise that religious practices in themselves are neither restricting nor liberating; rather rituals provide a perceptual context with the ability to affect the self-understanding of participants, as also their conception of agency, in a way that spills across nonlƒW