Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields

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.