Author: Julia Leslie
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120810365
Category : Hindu women
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
The considerable interest currently being expressed in women and religion has thrown down an important challenge; the need to see women not merely as the passive victims of an oppressive ideology but also perhaps primarily as the active agents of their own positive constructs. This book therefore aims to fill a notable gap in the literature. Twelve contributors study the role of women in Hindu religion by examining textual studies of the part played by women in a variety of religion rituals, both past and present, by exploring the socio-religious context of their various communites; and by using specialist material to draw on cross-cultural conclusions.
Author: Vijay Kumar Gupta
Publisher: MD Pub Pvt Limited
ISBN: 9788175332683
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Author: Alfred De Souza
Publisher: Delhi : Manohar Book Service
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Anthology of essays on the role of women in social change in India - includes discrimination, social mobility, employment and family life, women's rights, religion, the ageing women, emigrants to the UK, etc. Bibliography pp. 253 to 258, references and statistical tables.
Author: Tracy Pintchman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198039344
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
In this book, Tracy Pintchman has assembled ten leading scholars of Hinduism to explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's rituals and their lives beyond ritual. The book focuses particularly on the relationship of women's ritual practices to domesticity, exposing and exploring the nuances, complexities, and limits of this relationship. In many cultural and historical contexts, including contemporary India, women's everyday lives tend to revolve heavily around domestic and interpersonal concerns, especially care for children, the home, husbands, and other relatives. Hence, women's religiosity also tends to emphasize the domestic realm and the relationships most central to women. But women's religious concerns certainly extend beyond domesticity. Furthermore, even the domestic religious activities that Hindu women perform may not merely replicate or affirm traditionally formulated domestic ideals but may function strategically to reconfigure, reinterpret, criticize, or even reject such ideals. This volume takes a fresh look at issues of the relationship between Hindu women's ritual practices and normative domesticity. In so doing, it emphasizes female innovation and agency in constituting and transforming both ritual and the domestic realm and calls attention to the limitations of normative domesticity as a category relevant to many forms of Hindu women's religious practice.
Author: Mandakranta Bose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135192588
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu belief system. It explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and texts of codes of conduct and how particular models of conduct for mortal women have been created. Hindu religious culture correlates philosophical speculation and social imperatives to situate femininity on a continuum from divine to mortal existence. This creates in the Hindu consciousness multiple - often contradictory - images of women, both as wielders and subjects of authority. The conception and evolution of the major Hindu goddesses, placed against the judgments passed by texts of Hindu sacred law on women’s nature and duties, illuminate the Hindu discourse on gender, the complexity of which is compounded by the distinctive spirituality of female ascetic poets. Drawing on a wide range of Sanskrit texts, the author explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and also from the social roles of women as reflected in, and prescribed by, texts of codes of conduct. She examines the idea of female divinity which gave rise to models of conduct for mortal women. Instead of a one-way order of ideological derivation, the author argues that there is constant traffic between both ways the notional and the actual feminine. This book brings together for the first time a wide range of material and offers fresh stimulating interpretations of women in the Hindu Tradition.
Author: Beatrix Hauser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000059227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Thākurānī Yātrā, local processions, and the role of female ritual specialists. The study uses the premise that religious practices in themselves are neither restricting nor liberating; rather rituals provide a perceptual context with the ability to affect the self-understanding of participants, as also their conception of agency, in a way that spills across non-ritual spheres. Conceptualizing gender identity as resulting from seen, but mostly unnoticed, everyday activities and approaching cultural performances as sites of collectively defining the self, the author offers a telling and vivid account of how women perceive, realize and reflect on religious ideas, while engaging in rituals and, by doing so, negotiate complex gender norms. The book also examines the assumptions of recent theories on the social construction of identities, often-debated impact of religion on women, performativity, self-identity, and ritual agency in considering ‘doing’ gender in a traditional, non-Western context. This book will serve as essential reading for scholars of sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, history, religion, performance, and folklore studies.
Author: Shakuntala Devi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Women In Ancient India Played A Dynamic Role In Hindu Society. During The Muslim Period, Indian Woman Had To Adapt Her Role According To Changing Circumstances And Social Evils Like Child Marriage And Purdah System Came Into Vogue And Women s Status Under Went Subservient. Indian Women Have Responded To Modern Conditions In A Very Progressive Way. Indian Woman Have Made Its Mark In The Field Of Politics, Education And Professions. Inspite Of High Illiteracy Rate Among Indian Women, India Has Produced Eminent Indian Women In The Post Independence Period. This Book Examines The Role Of Indian Women In A Historical And Comparative Perspectives. The Book It Is Hoped Will Be Found Useful By Social Scientists, Policy Planners And National Leaders.
Author: Stephanie W. Jamison
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195096620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Jamison examines the conceptual position of women in the culture of early India, specifically the Vedic and early epic periods (c. 1500-200 BC). Jamison begins by focusing on a single, apparently marginal female role, the activities of the "Sacrificer's Wife" in solemn ritual, and isolating the set of conceptual functions filled by the wife in that context. She then turns to a brief but emblematic myth from the middle Vedic period, "Manu's cups", in which a woman barely escapes being sacrificed with the consent of her husband. This story, Jamison shows, raises questions about women's ritual role and about hospitality obligations that the rest of the book sets out to answer. The central portion of the book is then given over to an extended consideration of women's roles in solemn Vedic ritual. Drawing on the vast corpus of textual material on solemn ritual, Jamison is able to delineate a sharply focused picture of women and their functional roles in this realm where abstract rituals are enacted and encoded. She goes on to apply these concepts to the "messy sprawl in everyday life", primarily as depicted in epic narrative (especially the Mahabharata) and regulated in the legal literature. Particular attention is given to the role of women in the areas of hospitality, gift exchange and marriage. Jamison's analysis not only illuminates ancient Indian attitudes toward women and gender, but forces a radical reassessment of the institutions under review.
Author: Anita Spring
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468424009
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
This volume of essays grew out of a symposium organized by Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring for the 1974 American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico City. The two-part symposium was enti tled "Women in Ritual and Symbolic Systems: I. Midwives, Madonnas, and Mediums; ll. Prostitutes, Witches, and Androgynes. " The sym posium participants were asked to explore theological, ritual, and sym bolic aspects-both positive and negative-of the feminine cultural do main, using ethnographic materials with which they were familiar. The resulting papers have been revised, edited, and gathered together in Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. The theoretical importance of these papers for the study of women's participation in culture and society rests on the assumption that reli gious ideas are paramount forces in social life, that relationships be tween the sexes, the nature of female sexuality, and the social and cul tural roles of women are in large part defined by religious ideas. That this proposition remains valid long after religion itself has ceased to be a living truth in the lives of many people can be seen from the tenacious ness of Judeo-Christian ideas about women in the contemporary West ern world. Both the expansion of life options for women and the creation of more positive cultural images of the female are intimately related to changes in the my tho-symbolic portraits that people carry around in their heads. These portraits are almost exclusively constructed from mythological and religious conceptions inherent in all facets of culture.
Author: Sita Anantha Raman
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Looks at Indian history from ancient to modern times revealing precisely why ideas of gender rights were not static across eras or regions. Integrates women's issues, roles, and achievements into the general study of the times, providing a clear presentation of the social, cultural, religious, political, and economic realities that have helped shape the identity of Indian women. With a focus on gender and female sexuality in terms of representations in male texts of the premodern era; their later use by men and women for contemporary social and political purposes; women's narratives in their social contexts; and the issues of female agency and objectification, addresses women's subordinate nature in India, but also their active resistance, avenues for self-expression, negotiations with patriarchy, and support of oppressive traditions.
