Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town

This book offers a detailed ethnography of traditional, predominantly upper-caste, sequestered Hindu women in the south-eastern Indian temple town of Bhubaneswar. Offering a clear portrait of these women, it interprets, rather than translates, their lives.

It presents a cultural model of subjective or psychological wellbeing It is a fine-grained analysis of a particular paradigm of domesticity It examines the degree to which individual liberty and gender equalitythe values espoused by liberal feminismare universally relevant

Autorentext

Usha Menon received her Ph. D. (with Honors) in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has done fieldwork in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, as well as in the northern Indian city of Meerut. She has written extensively on different aspects of Hindu society and civilization, in particular on goddess worship, family dynamics, gender relations, Hindu morality, Hindu women and liberal feminism, and HinduMuslim religious violence.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Women, Wellbeing and the Ethics of Domesticity: An Introduction.- Chapter 2: Entering the Temple Town of Bhubaneswar.- Chapter 3: Odia Hindu Ways of Thinking.- Chapter 4: Perceptions of Femaleness.- Chapter 5: Images of the Life Course.- Chapter 6: Managing the Household: Achieving Control, Being Productive, Distributing Resources.- Chapter 7: The Auspicious Heart: Dominance, Productivity, and Coherence.- Chapter 8: Managing Life and its Processes.- Chapter 9: The Temple Town as a Microcosm.- Chapter 10: Conclusions.