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

  • Book
  • © 2013

Overview

Authors:
  1. Usha Menon

    1. , Department of Culture and Communication, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

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  • 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 equality—the values espoused by liberal feminism—are universally relevant

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  2. Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity: An Introduction

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 1-25

  3. Entering the Temple Town of Bhubaneswar

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 27-56

  4. Odia Hindu Ways of Thinking

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 57-75

  5. Perceptions of Femaleness

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 77-100

  6. Images of the Life Course

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 101-122

  7. Managing the Household: Achieving Control, Being Productive, Distributing Resources

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 123-150

  8. The Auspicious Heart: Influence, Productivity, and Coherence

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 151-173

  9. Managing Life and Its Processes

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 175-194

  10. An Alternate Moral Order

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 195-217

  11. Conclusions

    • Usha Menon
    Pages 219-228

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 229-244
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Keywords

About this book

This book is a detailed ethnography of traditional, predominantly upper-caste, sequestered Hindu women in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, a state in eastern India. It elaborates on a distinctive paradigm of domesticity and explicates a particular model of human wellbeing among this category. Part of the growing literature in “third wave” or “multicultural feminism”, it seeks to broaden the parameters of feminist discourse by going beyond questions of individual liberty or gender equality to examine the potential for female empowerment that exists in the context of these women’s lives. Its aims are twofold: first, to represent these women in ways that they themselves would recognize; and, second, to interpret, rather than merely “translate”, the beliefs and practices of the temple town such that their underlying logic becomes readily accessible to readers, even those unfamiliar with the Hindu world.

Authors and Affiliations

  • , Department of Culture and Communication, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

    Usha Menon

About the author

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 Hindu–Muslim religious violence.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town

  • Authors: Usha Menon

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0885-3

  • Publisher: Springer New Delhi

  • eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer India 2013

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-81-322-0884-6Published: 20 March 2013

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-81-322-1736-7Published: 07 March 2015

  • eBook ISBN: 978-81-322-0885-3Published: 01 March 2013

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIX, 244

  • Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Anthropology, Gender Studies, Regional and Cultural Studies

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