Death, beauty, struggle : untouchable women create the world

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Bibliographic Information

Death, beauty, struggle : untouchable women create the world

Margaret Trawick ; foreword by Ann Grodzins Gold

(Contemporary ethnography series)

University of Pennsylvania Press, c2017

Available at  / 2 libraries

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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

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