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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion

Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion

Ramberg, Lucinda

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Gender StudiesHinduism

ISBN10: 0822357100
ISBN13: 9780822357100
Publisher: Duke Univ Pr
Published: Sep 17 2014
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
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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