Anthropological
Explorations in Gender : Intersecting Fields/Leela Dube. New Delhi, Sage,
2001, 268 p., $33. ISBN 81-7036-962-2.
Anthropological
Explorations in Gender : Intersecting Fields/Leela Dube. New Delhi, Sage,
2001, 268 p., $33. ISBN 81-7036-962-2.
Contents: Maps for a different journey: themes in the work of Leela Dube/Kamala Ganesh. Introduction. 1. Woman’s worlds—three encounters. 2. On the construction of gender: socialization of Hindu girls in Patrilineal India. 3. Seed and earth: the symbolism of biological reproduction and sexual relations of production. 4. Caste and women. 5. Who gains from Matriliny? Men, women, and change on a Lakshadweep Island. 6. Kinship and gender in South and Southeast Asia: patterns and contrasts. Index.
"In their central concerns, anthropology and sociology in India have lacked a consistent gender perspective. Women’s issues and gender relations are usually kept confined to a separate niche. Conversely, women’s collective actions (movements) and feminism, while drawing much needed attention to women’s issues, tend to err on the opposite side of exclusivism.
In Anthropological Explorations in Gender, Leela Dube addressed a range of interrelated themes in a study of gender, kinship, and culture, by bringing together extensive fieldwork, personal narratives, a corpus of ethnography, and theory. Materials have been drawn from multiple and often unusual sources, including indigenous categories of thought and forms of speech, symbols and metaphors, quotidian rituals and practices, and people’s voices gleaned through everyday encounters and experiences.
The incisive analysis offered by the author suggests newer ways of understanding caste, kinship, culture, and gender. The essays collected here weave together gender and anthropological perspectives and thus constitute a constructive critique of established sociological concerns."
[Leela Dube has been Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library: National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research; Chairperson, Commission on Women, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and J.P. Naik Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi.]