ethnography

A Filmmaker and Ethnographer Retells Stories of Indigenous Art

Nina Sabnani, a filmmaker, illustrator and researcher in ethnography of numerous indigenous artist communities across India, talks about how stories must be constantly retold to keep them alive.

Nina Sabnani. Credit: The Life of Science

Passing through the many corridors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, I finally arrived at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), IIT’s design school. IDC might have started off very ‘industrial’ but it is now brimming with creative expression and campaigns to acknowledge traditional indigenous Indian art. A prototype of the next Indian post box was on the right and a schema defining best product design practices on the left and in front of me, several glass doors, beyond which sat Nina Sabnani, filmmaker, illustrator and researcher in ethnography of numerous indigenous artist communities across India.

Sabnani, in spirit, is a storyteller. She tells real stories through her short documentary animation films. “I was always interested in animating other people’s art – not my own. If I look back, two things have really guided me in some sense. One is working with communities and the other is retelling of stories in a current context,” said the 60-year-old as we started the conversation in her neat office spotted with Rajasthani Kaavad shrines, Bhil paintings from Madhya Pradesh and stacks of all the films she has made in her long journey.

Her own story started in Baroda at a fine-arts college, where she trained to be an artist. After this, she spent 26 years studying and teaching at National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad – India’s premier design school.

“I did not do my masters immediately after my college. I felt like learning was being presented like going through the rut… I wanted learning to be a more fun thing so I did my masters only when I was 41-42.”

“In between [her NID phase] I got the Fulbright fellowship, I went to Syracuse, USA, to do my masters. That opened my mind to new technologies. I was introduced to new media and things like that.”

“It was very exciting but I did not know quite what to do with it,” she said reflecting on the time when she was introduced to the new world of computer animation whilst still enamoured by hand-done stitches, patchwork and embroidery in Gujarat. The fascination of vibrant art created with painstaking hours of handiwork by artist communities in India pushed forward by strong culture and traditions, never left Sabnani.

“But still if I look at it through the rearview mirror, then I think my time abroad liberated me from this dichotomy of hand versus machine. I use them both. In my work, they really come together. I see technology as a very positive thing for my work.”

“With the kind of software we have now, I’m able to animate with traditional crafts and still retain the aesthetic and the tactile…sensorial part of the crafts that I like very much.”

Retelling stories through animation

“How do stories stay alive? Because they are constantly retold,” Sabnani declared her central philosophy mid-interview. Later she handed me four CDs from a huge stack. When I watched her films, one by one, I began to really understand her work. These films are the equivalent of a research paper for Sabnani, much more accessible and a lot more colourful.

The first film Sabnani made was based on a series of four Madhubani paintings she bought at an exhibition in 1981. The fact that the art was themed on an anti-dowry sentiment struck her. This film and all the other ones that came after have been a channel for such an indigenous voice coming out of traditional art.

Her second film titled Mukand and Riaz was an ode to her father. “He had come to India as a refugee during the partition but he had never ever talked about his story. This was a story I decided to tell with my father.”

“When he was very ill, he felt that he had to share his story with somebody and I was a good listener I think. I wrote down the story of how his friend (Riaz) who was a Pakistani Muslim helped him (Mukand) escape with his family.”

Mukand and Riaz is set against the bloody massacre over religion during the 1947 partition. The timely film came out in 2006 when the country was reeling from the gruesome communal riots in Gujarat. “In a riot-torn Gujarat [where her father had always lived], he had never done anything proactively to bridge these communal gaps. So it was for him.”

The film was crafted in cloth with applique work and embroidery by artists from Gujarat. “I did not want my father to look like a cartoon character. And it was appropriate since he worked in the textile mills there.”

“One week before my father died, I had finished the film to show him,” she said, still showing signs of the giant relief.

Non-linear stories with the Kaavad

After her father passed away, Sabnani felt she needed a major shift in her life. “I just did not want to go on making one film after another. I wanted to do something more reflective.”

She had heard about the research opportunities at IDC and decided to apply. But the question lingered – research what?

Sabnani was coming from a background where new media and non-linearity was an emerging field of study. “I started looking at old traditions, storytelling traditions as non-linear kind of modes. If you look at the Phad of Rajasthan, nothing is connected to anything, they never tell the whole narrative. And it is also multimedia because they sing, they dance, they light it up. I attempted to connect my excitement for new media with my passion for older traditions.”

Phad art introduced her to the tradition of Kaavad – a portable shrine that opens up it’s many layers to retell old legends carried forward by a community of artists and storytellers from Rajasthan.

Inspired by the Kaavad, Sabnani organised a storytelling conference to showcase her own creation – an interactive Kaavad. One of the people who had come to the conference remarked: “This is appropriation!” This sent Sabnani deeper into reflection over her work: “Like a typical designer, I had appropriated what I liked in the craft and made it into whatever [suited me]. Then I thought haan, she’s right… this is appropriation, I cannot do this. I don’t even know what it is all about.” Another conference attendant said: “iska toh Ph.D. ho sakta hai. (this topic is extensive enough for a Ph.D.)”

These two comments stayed in Sabnani’s mind forever and inspired her Ph.D. topic. “I decided, I must find out more about Kaavad tradition and the community.”

Accepted at IIT as a 50-year-old Ph.D. student, she spent the next five-six years with Kaavad artists and storytellers in the eastern part of Rajasthan, in a village called Bassi.

The film It’s the Same Story encapsulates the reasons the Kaavad is carried in the first place and dwells deeper into how different versions of the same story are told by different storytellers. “In our research, there were two Kaavad storytellers telling the same story in different ways. I decided to tell both in my film, to understand that there are so many ways to look at the same thing.”

Sabnani believes that summarising what one has learnt from their research is a challenge for her. She has explored through her films, different methods of enveloping the findings of her ethnographic research.

Her aim has been to bring the true context and inspiration behind traditional art into her films so that without saying this is research, it reaches people and makes them think about a new way of looking at something. “Ultimately, research is a new kind of knowledge, isn’t it?”

Research that empowers communities

“I have studied animation and practised animation, but I also use animation as a way to research,” Sabnani said.

Since working with the Kaavad storytellers, she has been more interested in working with communities and seeing animation as a way of learning about them. She explained her uneasiness with the distance brought on with the camera pointed at a community by an outsider as if it was a wildlife documentary: “When you do live action filming, you are always operating with this invasive eye, looking at them with a camera.”

“Whereas, in this kind of research, the communities end up producing their own art, the film and their own representation of their reality. And we are animating that with their voice.”

“Now all my work is more research-oriented rather than just making films.”

Her most recent film We Make Images retells a myth of the Bhil people of Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh. It examines the artist community with the question: Why do the Bhil paint? With moving and pulsating Bhil paintings by Bhil artists themselves, the film unravels the community’s fixation with painting trees on walls, pots and pretty much everything so that the rains don’t stop pouring down and the prophecy laid down by their Badvaji (shaman) continues to be fulfilled.

“If I want to to learn about this community, one way to do it is by sitting down and filming them, talking to them and learn, interviews them, watch them and write down everything.”

Leaving this method behind, Sabnani is able to take Participant Observation method of ethnography to the next level. The medium of her work (animation) allows for a clear tangible outcome (a film) to be produced in collaboration between the researcher and the subject.

“We usually start with a workshop where they are painting, they are showing us how to paint. I learn everything about what goes into the making of the painting, the subjects and what is he/she is doing.”

“Further, when the film is being made, the artist can say ‘oh not this way’, the element will not move like this, this won’t happen like this…all of these things that he is unable to tell me [if he doesn’t participate in the making], because he doesn’t know what I don’t know,” she laughed.

“In this way, animation becomes a way of doing research with the participants, in collaboration and it also a way of representing the ethnography. What you have observed becomes a part of the film, it becomes tangible and accessible.”

As she talked about bringing research methodology closer to the subject, I couldn’t help drawing the connections to scientific research conducted in most labs. She then brought up the question: who is research for? “It tends to be [presented] as if you are speaking to other researchers, and it speaks a language which people find very hard to understand, mostly it stays in libraries or it is presented in some conferences.”

“The participants are outside of it – they don’t get anything. In this way, they get something, at the end of the research process, they have a film, which has their voices, their art, their life stories which make them feel empowered in some sense. So one looks at animation as a way of empowering communities also.”

As one of the subjects of her research on Kutch artists said after watching the film The Stitches Speak that Sabnani made with them: “This is not our story, it is our history.”

Today as the Professor of Visual Ethnography at IIT, Sabnani continues nurturing her own research process and that of her students. Some of the topics she is involved in through her Ph.D. students include the notion of domesticity in Hindi cinema, using images as prompts instead of words in the classroom to elicit essay writing and the non-formal art training that children of Bhil artists get in their lifetime.

Learning is now one of Sabnani’s special interests. As her own journey has professed, learning is not a time-bound activity, restricted to one period of a student’s life; it is instead a lifelong journey. From her rich experience, stems mentorship (she has put together this online course) and of course all of IIT.

“We made a pitch for an open design school at the [HR and Education] ministry recently and we have been given a year to work on two courses, which will be online. They are based on blended learning so partly you come to a place of study and partly you learn on your own, at your own pace.”

This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet some unsung women scientists.

Why it is Crucial to Locate the ‘African’ in African Studies

African Studies remains a colonised space rife with misrepresentation, homogenisation and essentialising about Africa.

1910 map of the colonisation of Africa. Credit: worldatlas.com

Africans have always produced knowledge about Africa. Their contributions have in some cases been “preferably unheard”. In others they’ve been “deliberately silenced”.

So what constitutes an “African” in the heyday of multiple citizenships and transnational flows of goods, ideas and people? In the first instance, an “African” has birthplace or bloodline ties to Africa. More importantly, an “African” has a psychological attachment to the continent. He or she is politically committed to its transformation.

I am approaching this question as a scholar of African Studies. The field’s purpose is to constantly interrogate epistemological, methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of Africa. Its role is to insert Africa and its people at the centre of that interrogation as subjects rather than objects. It is worth examining whether or not scholars of Africa have lived up to this mandate.

Decolonising the space

African Studies remains a colonised space rife with misrepresentation, homogenisation and essentialising about Africa. Early writings and teachings about Africa are based on colonial expeditions, missionary exploits and anthropological ethnographies. Contemporary scholarship is dominated by some non-Africans who have strategically positioned themselves as the authoritative voices in a 21st century scramble for influence – as if Africa were a tabula rasa with no intellectuals or knowledge production of its own. This form of erasure is problematic and dangerous.

There have long been active demands to decolonise African Studies. The African Studies Association first invited Africa-based scholars in large numbers to its 1969 meeting in Montreal, Canada. Black American Africa scholars seized the platform. They argued that African Studies was firmly cemented on a foundation of institutional racism. Some years later, at the association’s meeting in Seattle, in the US, Nigerian scholar Oyekan Owomoyela questioned whether or not African Studies had lived up to its ideal of producing and promoting “knowledge about Africa for purposes other than its exploitation”.

More recently, in her keynote lecture at the association’s 2006 meeting in San Francisco, in the US, Nigerian feminist scholar Amina Mama demonstrated that producing knowledge about Africa is an ethical dilemma as much as an epistemological consideration. This is true for Africans and non-Africans alike. She asked:

Can we develop the study of Africa so that it is more respectful toward the lives and struggles of African people and to their agendas?

She argued that Africanists in America were complicit in advancing a colonial patriarchal order by dismissing African scholars’ intellectual agendas. She has challenged the “externalisation of Africa scholarship”, which uncritically relies on externally generated concepts and methods. These transform highly complex processes into overly simplistic, homogenous tropes about Africa.

Structural inequities

Mama and others have shown that publishing about Africa is punctuated with structural inequities in which Africans are often dissed and dismissed. A recent scholarly article tracked the general decline in the number of articles published by Africa-based scholars in two top African Studies journals between 1993 and 2013. The authors illustrate that while article submissions from Africa-based scholars have increased for both African Affairs and the Journal of Modern African Studies, acceptance rates have declined significantly. Both of these journals are based in Europe.

There has been a wave in recent years of African-led publications. These include Feminist Africa, which Mama founded, and the Journal of West African History, which was started by author and academic Nwando Achebe. The Dakar, Senegal-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa also publishes extensively about Africa by Africans.

But this increase in alternative platforms does not exempt non-African publishers, editors and reviewers from addressing glaring citation and publication gaps in the field.

In light of these developments, it is timely and essential to ask where the “African” is in African Studies.

I am a Liberian who has studied Africa intently in North America, Africa and Europe. I’ve discovered that the extent to which the “African” in African Studies is concealed or revealed depends entirely on who writes or teaches about Africa. It also depends on where, how and what they write or teach about Africa. Essentially, it depends on the knowledge producer’s politics, the ethos of the institution they represent, the pedagogy and methods they employ, and on their level of commitment to the continent and its people.

Foregrounding the discussion about where the “African” is in African Studies as an ethical dilemma raises the stakes. It forces African and non-African scholars of Africa alike to remain self-reflexive, humble and accountable to the continent and its people.

A more radical approach

Perhaps, as Owomoyela has suggested, a more radical approach to “getting ‘Africa’ back into African Studies is to get African Studies back to Africa”.

This can be achieved in several ways:

A canon must be established of scholarly literature produced by Africans. It must include male and female scholars writing in multiple languages across the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities. This would be mandatory reading for all African Studies courses across the globe.
Non-African scholars must defer to authoritative voices and scholars on the continent. They can do so by citing them regularly and actively acknowledging their contributions to the field.
Open-access publishing on Africa must become the norm rather than the exception. This will allow Africa-based scholars to access, engage with and critique knowledge produced about the continent.
More African scholars – based in Africa and elsewhere – must serve on the editorial boards of top-rated African Studies journals, as both editors and reviewers. In this way they’ll be able to influence these publications’ research agendas.
African universities must value, support and validate good quality scholarship about Africa. Staff need research funding and living wages. They need sabbatical time to write and publish. They need paid subscriptions to relevant journals.

These measures and more like them will compel us to effectively re-insert the “African” in African Studies. Not as a token gesture, but as an affirmation that Africans have always produced knowledge about their continent.

A longer version of this article was originally published in African Arguments.

Robtel Neajai Pailey, Senior Researcher, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Interview: The Politics of Food in Gaza

In conversation with Laila El-Haddad about her ethnographic cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen, and the politics of food.

Women Unlimited, India’s first and oldest feminist press, hosted a three-day Palestine in India Writers’ Colloquium. One of the speakers at the event was Palestinian journalist, blogger and author Laila El-Haddad. Although El-Haddad grew up in the Gulf, she returned to Gaza as an adult, and she now travels between the US and Palestine.

El-Haddad’s style of writing uses the lens of personal experiences to talk about political developments and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, to describe what she called ‘the intimacy of the Palestinian struggle’. In conversation with The Wire, El-Haddad talks about The Gaza Kitchen, an ethnographic cookbook she has co-authored.

Laila El-Haddad. Credit: Jahnavi Sen

The Gaza Kitchen doesn’t sound like your average cookbook. Could you describe the project?

Ever since I was a child I’ve had a passion for exploring ethnic Palestinian cuisine. I was trying to piece together fragments of my identity at a time when my parents were doing everything they could to not necessarily repress those memories, but have me live a “normal life” and keep me away from all the turmoil. But I wanted desperately to extract those memories and form my own identity. So I had a fascination for exploring native dishes, even those that were no longer as common, or weren’t cooked for children so I didn’t know about them.

Then as I got older and went to Gaza, it became a habit to record these kinds of dishes and sometimes write about them on my blog. Then fast forward a few more years to when I was back in the US, and was approached by a colleague, Maggie Schmitt, who had just visited Gaza. She is an activist and writer herself, American but living in Madrid. She was interested in writing an article about the foods of Gaza, because she too noticed that the cuisine there is unique, quite different from the rest of the region. That was the beginning of the inspiration for this book. I had been wanting to do this for a long time, and she brought her anthropological background and mind, and localised knowledge.

It was quite difficult to make this project a reality, because at the point the border was closed. We had to wait a year for the border to open, and once it did we kind of just seized the moment and went there – that was actually the first time Maggie and I met in person. I even took my children; we were like a big travelling circus. We spent the next two to three months there just talking to people about food. it was very hard, because this was during the Ramadan period and people were fasting. I still often wonder how we did this, it’s insane the amount of information we were able to collect in a short amount of time. We interviewed men and women, farmers, agronomists – one interview would lead to another. We just wanted to get a sense of the everyday life, and people were constantly surprised that we were there to talk to them about food. Of course our understanding was that through food other topics would emerge, more political topics. But our questions weren’t about the latest attack or tunnel, they weren’t the kind of questions people are very used to from journalists. People were really receptive to our idea. We were pleasantly surprised that it was not just the women but also men who were so enthusiastic to tell us these recipes.

In the book, we often refer to what happens in the kitchen as the ‘perpetuation of history’. The reason we chose Gaza is because first of all I’m from there, but also because Gaza is very unique in the sense that a majority of the people living there are not native Gazans. They’re from villages and towns in southwest Palestine that were ethnically cleansed, forcing people to flee to Gaza. Then the borders were drawn around them. So we explore the historic southwest Palestine through the microcosm of Gaza. You get to not only taste all the different foods, but also the memories of all those disappeared villages. They may no longer exist on a map, but you can still taste them through their food. So the idea was to be able to codify this knowledge, talk about the intersection of food and politics, and use food as a lens to explore other topical issues like the blockade on farming, the water crisis, and local debates around agricultural sustainability.

So it may not be a glossy, pretty typical cookbook, but that was the idea.

You call the book a feminist project. Could you explain that?

It was conceived also to oppose the very caricatured representations we have of not just women in Gaza but also of Arab women as a whole in the media. Gaza has a reputation of being very conservative, very “backward”. We wanted to show real human depictions of people. We call it feminist mainly because it was women-centric, not so much feminist in the Western sense of the word. We wanted to create a space where experiences could be narrated through the voices of Palestinian women.

Frequently, our stories are narrated through men. The public face of food is male, even here in India. We wanted to go beyond that, to look at things a little differently. A lot of history is perpetuated by women, knowledge is passed on by them. So our aim was to get their perspective on things.

Has there been a noticeable change in the cuisine through the occupation, especially now that so many cuisines exist in the Gaza strip?

A lot of the food has maintained it’s regional specificity, in the sense that even though it’s a very small areas, two-thirds the size of Delhi, yet you have people from villages and towns that no longer exist insisting that this food is from this particular village. They say “It’s different from how they do it in Gaza city,” even if now they live five minutes from Gaza city. It’s incredible, and it really speaks to the human capacity to retain memories.

People are obviously very proud of their heritage, but this is also a tool of resistance for them. It’s empowering to be able to say, “we can still cook this and nobody can interfere with that,” even in the face of insurmountable odds with risks to your lives and livelihoods. They may not have access to the same ingredients, but this still have control over something in the realm of food.

What has this exploration into food said about the region?

What I learnt was that the broader Gaza region was a major spice depot, and a stop along the Frankincense Route to Arabia. There were several resting places for caravans, and it was the intersection of continents, Africa and Asia. So it had an important historical role, and was known as a rich city, quite different from how it is today. It was also at one point the main port along the Mediterranean. The inland part of Gaza was completely separated from the port area, which had heavy Mediterranean influences like the use of dill, which is not used elsewhere. There’s also a lot of spices used, probably absorbed because of the Frankincense Route. It’s just a fascinating story. The rest of Palestinian cuisine has a lot in common with Levantine cuisines of Syria and Lebanon. The Gaza region breaks this mould.

It’s also nice to remind ourselves that Gaza wasn’t always isolated this way, it interacted with the rest of the world and exchanged ideas with different cultures and peoples. This opens up the realm of possibilities for our imagination.

What Devadasi Rites Tell Us About the Sexuality of Religion

Who and what are marriage and sex for? Whose practices and which ways of talking to god can count as religion?

Lucinda Ramberg’s first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion has just been awarded the 2015 Clifford Geertz Prize in the anthropology of religion and the first Michelle Rosaldo Prize for a first book in feminist anthropology. An extract:

Mahadevi, a Matangi pujari. Credit: Brett Isis Fisher

One day the jogatis took me to the river for a puja. Mahadevi came to our door early in the morning, saying: “Today we are taking the devi to the river – will you come along?” My research assistant Jyoti and I had gone roaming with the jogatis before, traveling from farmhouse to farmhouse for household rites on auspicious occasions such as the birth of a female buffalo calf or the successful drilling of a new bore well. This time, for the festival of the river goddess, we climbed in a flat bed truck trailing a big green tractor. The two traveling devis – Yellamma and Matangi – had been placed in the front of the truck. Along the way, a bumpy ride over the pock marked roads characteristic of this sugar cane-rich and infrastructure-poor district in Northern Karnataka, I asked Mahadevi whose tractor we were traveling in. She pointed to the landlord farmer swaying in the tractor seat next to the driver and explained that he and his wife were without children, despite several years of marriage, so he had decided to sponsor the bringing of the devi to the river.

I recognized in this account the making of a harake in which devotees seek to secure blessings of fertility and prosperity from the devi through acts of propitiation towards her. Devotees make material or bodily offerings such as grain, saris, silver ornaments, pilgrimages, prostrations, renunciations, or ecstatic performances. As persons who are given, or who give themselves to the devi in fulfillment of harake, jogatis themselves take the form of such offerings. Their dedication to the devi is conducted as a rite of marriage to her. This marriage authorizes them to perform rites in her name, such as the one in which we were brought to participate that day at the river Krishna.

Mahadevi and Lakshmibai smiling. Credit: Lucinda Ramberg

A print offering to Yellamma. Credit: Lucinda Ramberg

Pilgrims from all the surrounding villages thronged the riverbank. Oxen carts were pulled alongside big green tractors into the flowing river, where farmers splashed water on the implements of their labor. Having bathed and finished their puja, people sat eating and children brandished their festival trophies: small plastic toys and candy. After overseeing the carrying of the two devis to a clearing in the crowd, Mahadevi conducted their bathing and ornamentation. Then she reached inside the basket into the lap or womb (udi) of the devi and drew out a fresh coconut. Beckoning to the landlord’s wife to follow her, Mahadevi led a small procession, including three musicians playing the instruments of Yellamma, to the water’s edge. There she dipped the coconut in the river, anointed it with scarlet kumkuma, worshipped it with fire (arthi) and placed it in the curved fold of sari silk the woman held outstretched at the level of her abdomen, into her udi.

Writing rites

Kamlabai preparing for puja. Credit: Brett Isis Fisher

Rites of devi propitiation are ubiquitous and everyday in South India. What is noteworthy about this rite, however, is tied to the question of who or what jogatis are. The South Indian women this book is about do not marry men; they marry a goddess. Jogatis are given, or dedicated to Yellamma as children by their parents. All those dedicated to Yellamma wrap saris and embody the devi. That is, whether recognized as boys or girls as children, they become women and are called jogatis although male women are more commonly called jogappas. Jogatis are also called and call themselves devadasis, which is a pan Indian term usually translated as servant or slave of the god. Dedication is their central initiation rite. They become Yellamma’s pujaris, Dalit women who transact in the favor of the goddess outside the walls of her main temple and in sex outside the bounds of conjugal matrimony. Their alliance with the goddess, however, is not recognized as matter of legitimate religion or kinship within the law or by state authorities. Indeed, in the most recent wave of over one hundred years of reform begun in the colonial era, the practice of dedication, as well as all the rites it authorizes jogatis to perform, including the one described above, have been criminalized.

Jogatis are typically defined exclusively through their illicit sexuality. When I began the field research for this book in 2001 I did not expect to encounter devadasis actively performing rites. I was to be surprised otherwise. One day in 2002 at a Yellamma temple in Northern Karnataka I encountered two dedicated women. They were seated on either side of Matangi, for whom they were receiving offerings and giving blessings. “What do they call you?” I asked. “Pujaris” (priests, caretakers), they said, laughing at my ignorance, “What else would they call us? We keep the devi.”

What does it mean to ‘keep the devi’? This question has been answered in different ways. The scene I describe by the river Krishna might be read as (yet another) ethnographic rendering of timeless ritual in the Indian subcontinent, an episode in the story told by the West about the East through an Orientalist lens (Said 1978). Alternatively, it might appear as an account of female religious leadership and ritual balance between cosmic, earthly and human wellbeing in a wider record of universal feminine power and ecological value. From the point of view of Dalit, Christian, and feminist social reformers, the scene by the river displays the degraded position of outcaste women dedicated to a life of superstitious ritual enactments and sexual exploitation.

Mahadevi showing the day’s joga. Credit: Lucinda Ramberg

In this ethnography I offer another way to think about what was unfolding at the river that Spring day in 2003, one I came to by taking the question of who and what jogatis are as an open question best pursued by working closely with those whom come to call themselves jogati. This method foregrounds the terms jogatis themselves use to describe themselves and the world. As I show, these terms often exceed received categories of social scientific knowledge. As persons who are married to a goddess, jogatis conform neither to prevailing Dravidian patterns of kinmaking nor to dominant definitions of marriage as an alliance between two persons of the opposite sex. In short, jogatis exceed received conceptions of kinmaking. This excess is productive in two ways. I bring another interpretation of devadasi lives into view and it demonstrates some of the limits of certain modern forms of knowledge.

Lucinda Ramberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is currently at work on a project on the sexual politics of Dalit conversion to Buddhism.