Author: Leela Dube
Publisher: Sage Publications
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 258
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0761994858
Description
The essays collected here weave together gender and anthropological perspectives and the incisive analysis offered suggests newer ways of understanding caste, kinship; culture and gender.
In their central concerns, anthropology and sociology in India have lacked a consistent gender perspective. Women's issues and gender relations are usually kept confined to a separate niche. Conversely, women's collective actions and feminism, while drawing much needed attention to women's issues, tend to err on the opposite side of exclusivism.
In this work, Leela Dube addresses a range of interrelated themes in a study of gender, kinship, and culture, by ringing together extensive field-work, personal narratives, a corpus of ethnography and theory. Materials have been drawn from multiple and often unusual sources, including indigenous categories of thought and forms of speech, symbols and metaphors, quotidian rituals and practices, and people's voices gleaned through everyday encounters and experiences.
Throughout, the author's conceptualization of all-pervasive kinship is distinctive, interweaving material and symbolic/ ideological dimensions. Among other features it implicates rights over property, resources, space and children, and the meaning and content of marriage, all of which reflect on gender. This conceptualization of kinship substantially contributes to an innovative analysis of a matrilineal Muslim society on a far off island, and to an examination of the links between diverse forms of kinship and quality of gender relations by comparing different populations in South and Southeast Asia.