CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Bisht, Meera |
|---|---|
| Title | Exclusion in Deity Possession Rituals in Kumaon: Women mediums and viewers locked in the structures of Caste, Gender, and Religion |
| Summary | Deity possession rituals in India have long been imbued with the politics of gender and caste and quite recently, Hindu nationalism. Thought of as the preserve of the male and mostly, Hindu nationalist, upper caste elites, deity possession rituals are often criticized as exclusionary, with negligible female participation in the ritual conducted in Supi village in North India. The gap in the current scholarship on possession and gender in the Indian context entails a lack of analysis of the impact of recent sociopolitical and economic changes on women’s exclusion from religious participation. Employing the analytical framework of Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality, I explore the reproduction of women’s exclusion and the continuity of patrilineage. Furthermore, I use Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” to highlight women’s feminist consciousness of their exclusion and engagement in strategies to negotiate ritual patriarchy for their social mobility. I thus, further contribute to a wider understanding of how women mediums and viewers express agency while adhering to an overall ritual structure through employing the understudied arena of “home.” Drawing from ethnographic work done in 2018, 2019 and 2021 and using semi-structured interviews with the organizers, participants and viewers of rituals, my analysis demonstrates the ritual’s creation and maintenance of power through its growing interaction with the subliminal relations of changing social structures and religious organization and thus, I argue that neither social structures of caste, gender, and Hindu nationalism nor social and religious forms of patriarchy are sufficient to account for the persistent exclusion of and discrimination against women in possession ritual practices and sacred spaces. |
| Supervisor | Namescu, Vlad and Kowalski Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/bisht_meera.pdf |
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