Death, beauty, struggle : untouchable women create the world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Death, beauty, struggle : untouchable women create the world
(Contemporary ethnography series)
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2017
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-275) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Death, Beauty, Struggle represents a long labor of love and the summation of forty years of Margaret Trawick's groundbreaking research. Centering her gaze on the lowest castes of India, now called Dalits, she describes the experience of women at this precarious level who are still treated as sub-human, sometimes by family members, sometimes by higher-caste men. Their private worlds, however, are full of art; rural Dalit women sing beautiful songs of their own making and tell remarkable narratives of their own lives.
Much that Tamil women shared with Trawick is rooted in the passionate attachments and acute wounds generated within families, but these women's voices resonate well beyond individually circumscribed lives. In their songs and life stories they critique social, political, economic, and domestic oppressions. They also incorporate visions of natural beauty and immanent divinity. Trawick presents Tamil women's words as relevant to universal human themes.
Trawick's frames of analysis, developed throughout her long career of fieldwork in India, inform her ethnography of expressive culture. The songs and stories of Dalit women were recorded and transcribed, to be translated into lyrical passages in her own work. Death, Beauty, Struggle demonstrates a conviction that persons without privilege-from the rape victim to the landless laborer-possess both power and agency. Through verbal arts, Dalit women produce not only acute cultural critiques but also astonishing beauty.
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Ann Grodzins Gold
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Ma riamman
Chapter 2. Sorrow and Protest
Chapter 3. Work and Love
Chapter 4. On the Edge of the Wild
Chapter 5. The Life of Sevi
Chapter 6. The Song of Singamma
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary of Tamil Words and Phrases
References
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"