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Unfinished Gestures
Davesh Soneji
其他書名
Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India
出版
University of Chicago Press
, 2011-11-23
主題
Social Science / General
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Religion / Hinduism / Rituals & Practice
ISBN
0226768112
9780226768113
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=24uaoBjDKQgC&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
Unfinished Gestures
presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called
devadasis
, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in
devadasis
communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by
devadasi
s in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of
devadasis
identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today,
Unfinished Gestures
charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.