Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

Couverture
University of California Press, 15 nov. 2023 - 320 pages
Love, as a force in human affairs, is still not given much attention or credency by social scientists. With Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Margaret Trawick places the notion of love prominently in social scientific discourse. Her unforgettable and profusely illustrated study is a significant contribution to anthropology and to South Asian studies.

Trawick lived for a time in the midst of one large South Indian family and sought to understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of anpu--what in English we call love. Often enveloping the author herself, changing her as she inevitably changed her hosts, this family performed before the young anthropologist's eyes the meaning of anpu: through poetry and conversation, through the not always gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and across the great sexual boundary. She communicates with grace and insight what she learned from this Tamil family, and we discover that love is no less universal than selfishness and individualism.

À l'intérieur du livre

Pages sélectionnées

Table des matières

Siblings and Spouses
187
Padmini
192
Mohana
199
Patterns
204
Older Women and Younger Men
205
Vishvanathan
210
The Lives of Children
215
Jnana Oli
218

Ambiguity
37
A Theory
41
The Family
42
Methodology
50
Generations
53
Themozhiyar
62
Kings and Ascetics
65
Growing Up Tamil
75
Going Down Tamil
80
Houseflows
87
The Ideology of Love
89
Properties of Anpu
93
Desire in Kinship
117
Systems and Antisystems
118
Synthesis of Theories
148
Tensions and Harmonies
155
Conclusion
184
Sivamani
229
Arivaraci
233
Ponni
236
Final Thoughts
241
MirroringTwinning
243
ComplementationDynamic Union
245
Sequential Contrast
249
ProjectionIntrojection
251
Internal ContradictionCategory Mediation
252
Hiddenness
254
Plurality and Mixture Boundlessness and Reversal
257
Epilogue
259
Notes
261
References
281
Index
293
Droits d'auteur

Autres éditions - Tout afficher

Expressions et termes fréquents

Fréquemment cités

Page 141 - As he visits mother's brother often, ego will see a great deal of the daughter: contact will be established. As he is fond of mother's brother, and as mother's brother and his daughter in the patrilineal complex, the Oedipus complex if you will, are themselves particularly close to one another, he will tend to get fond of the daughter.
Page 267 - As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another...
Page 267 - ... clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another — then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one's orientation among them began.
Page 283 - Spirit Possession and Spirit Mediumship from the Perspective of Tulu Oral Traditions.
Page 243 - ... such a psychoanalytic formulation, Margaret Trawick points out that in this process of self-crafting — of defining the self in relation to the other — "as life proceeds, often, what happens to the self is neither individuation nor internal integration, but rather a continuous decrystallization and deindividuation of the self, a continuous effort to break down separation, isolation, purity, as though these states, left unopposed, would form of their own accord and freeze up life into death"...
Page xix - Trawick again, in our quest for understanding, we "have to come to terms with the fact that 'meaning' cannot be pinned down, is always sought but never apprehended, is never this and never that, never here nor there but always in between, always inherently elusive and always inherently ambiguous" (Trawick 1990, xix), a viewpoint that hijras would readily endorse.
Page 87 - are better seen as points of confluence than as "holds" in any stable sense. In them, many currents meet, mingle, and redivide.

Informations bibliographiques