I Arumugam
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 40732 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | I Arumugam |
| NOMBRES | I |
| APELLIDO | Arumugam |
| FIRMA | ARUMUGAM I |
| AFILIACIONES | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7623-6517 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 18 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 18 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Reduced to a Generic Goddess
Through stories and storytelling, this article tells of how a popular Tamil goddess, Veeramakaliamman, is birthed, bodied, placed, and propelled across time and space. Four narratives—derived from ethnographic fieldwork, historic and journalistic accounts, folk narratives, and personal memories—present Veeramakaliamman’s origins in the Tamil Nadu district of Pudukkottai as well as charting her growth, travel, and eventual overseas settlement in S…
Domesticating the Cosmic
This article is about the calendrical, climactic and especially cosmological implications of Karthigai Deepam, an ancient Tamil celebration pivoted around the lighting of lamps that precedes Deepavali, the quintessential, ubiquitous but also comparatively recent festival of lights. Karthigai Deepam signals the end of the rains, intensifying winter chills and winds and shorter days. Juxtaposing festival observances in homes and those in temples, I…
Sacred Leftovers
“Open the front door! Open the main gate! Only then will they come into the house...accept our invitation to feast. Switch off the television! No distractions.” The guests my father eagerly awaited were his parents, along with his uncle (his father’s younger brother). My grandparents have been dead for more than three decades. Every year, several days before the festivals of Pongal and Deepavali, my family hosts a worship called “pataiyal” (feast…
Ambivalent Adi
This paper is a counternarrative to how the month of Adi is customarily depicted as wholly inauspicious and requiring avoidance of life cycle events. Instead, I foreground the explicitly polyvalent and especially ambivalent ways in which Adi is lived by Tamil Hindus. Adi is both an inauspiciously sterile and an intensely fertile period; marked simultaneously by sexual/domestic austerity, ritual proliferation, religious piety but also festivity an…
Cooking Up a Distinctly Singaporean Tamil Cuisine
“Cheee, what is that stench?” exclaimed my mother-in-law, wrinkling her nose at the pungent fishy smell emanating from a neighbor’s kitchen. Visiting from Tamil Nadu, my mother-in-law was staying in our apartment in Singapore. Inhaling the scent appreciatively, I sighed, “That is the smell of toasting fermented shrimp paste (belacan in Malay) for making sambal (chili relish). I am so hungry.” Both my mother-in-law and I were born in rural Tamil N…
The sacred unbound
Dissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unexplained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically ac…
Heartbreaking anthropology hurts
Ethnography involves using the self as the mechanism to try to understand others and their life worlds. How is knowledge and knowledge production affected by the apparatus of knowing, the ethnographer experiencing cataclysms in their personal life? In this article, I grapple with the fraught dilemmas of doing fieldwork on mother goddesses and ritual cults premised on the cultivation of fertility while experiencing infertility and undergoing assis…
Centreing Women, Countering Killing
Some sacrifices are cosmogonic acts. Along with (re)creating the world, they create male social bonds by ritually appropriating and transcending women’s corporeal reproductive powers. Departing from these androcentric representations, this paper considers when, why and how (differently) women sacrifice. I compare an exclusively female domestic worship to the mother/midwife goddess Periyacci in Singapore from which men are forbidden with a male-ce…
Preserving Flesh and Spanning Families
“You always know when family is visiting from overseas. Outside their houses, threaded through twine and hung on fences and poles, will be chunks of goat meat and fish drying in the sun.”So ventured my mother’s sister, Chinnappa, who lives in Vaduvur, a village in central Tamil Nadu. In summer, temperatures in this village can rise to 45 degrees C (113 degrees F). So punishing is the sun that people try not to be outdoors between 10 am and 4 pm. …
Laying Out Feast-Offerings
In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on,…
Touchable Gods
Village and tutelary deities have been characterized as fierce, capricious, or at least ambiguous. This article explores another facet of these polysemous divinities: their kinship with their adherents. Against the thrust of recent emphases on the gentrification of rural cults, the interventions of ritual specialists and the establishing of distance between deities and laity, these gods remain messily tactile and persist in being directly touchab…
Gods as Monsters
This chapter explores the interpenetrations between sacrality and monstrosity in a village in Tamil Nadu, India. Minis are amoral fertility spirits which must be appeased to secure agricultural productivity. Muniswarar is a tutelary deity who guards against chaos and evil. Unlike in other related disciplines, the monsters that anthropologists grapple with are not simply art or artifacts. They not only haunt imaginations but also prowl the land. T…
Delighting in kinship
This paper is about pleasure, specifically the pleasure that women take in kinship. Contrary to its diminished importance within the discipline, kinship still resonates strongly for many of our interlocutors. Why is kinship so captivating? Kinship’s continued significance, I argue, is attributable not so much to its utility or morality but to the pleasure it evokes. In capturing the major implications of kinship, anthropologists have barely consi…
Divali is for The Dead
In the face of orthodox ritual imperatives to alienate and render them ineffable, how are ancestors made present to and represented by their living kin, specifically during festivities? This article juxtaposes Divali’s customary overtones of triumph over evil and darkness and cultivations of prosperity with additional, if not alternative, associations with mortality, mourning, and memory in a village in Tamil Nadu. In delineating the funerary and…
Migrant Deities
What happens to deities when their devotees migrate? Village deities are wrought of a particular landscapes and a specific people. Refusing to remain rooted to icons, shrines, or sites, they wander; albeit only within their own jurisdictions. Examining the resonance of Periyachi-the mother and midwife goddess-originally from rural Tamil Nadu and now in urban Singapore, I document the effects of dislocation from their homelands on intensely local …
Coercive gifts
This article considers the gift as a medium of politics in two parallel domains, namely the electoral and the ritual. Juxtaposing the material transactions during a rural election campaign and the distribution of meat after a sacrifice in a vernacular polity, it traces the continuing interpenetrations between philanthropy and politics in lubricating political associations. The properties of the political gift and the proprieties of its giving are…
The Old Gods Are Losing Power
Some Hindus are killing animals in larger numbers, more regularly, and in more spectacular fashions than they have ever done before. In contradiction of the ethnographic record asserting the diminishing significance of ritual killing since the nineteenth century, sacrifices to tutelary deities that had long been abandoned are being reactivated or enacted for the first time. However, such a counter-intuitive surge in the popularity of sacrifices i…
More than Meets the Eye. The Political Causes of the Asian Economic Crisis
The Old Gods Are Losing Power
Some Hindus are killing animals in larger numbers, more regularly, and in more spectacular fashions than they have ever done before. In contradiction of the ethnographic record asserting the diminishing significance of ritual killing since the nineteenth century, sacrifices to tutelary deities that had long been abandoned are being reactivated or enacted for the first time. However, such a counter-intuitive surge in the popularity of sacrifices i…
Migrant Deities
What happens to deities when their devotees migrate? Village deities are wrought of a particular landscapes and a specific people. Refusing to remain rooted to icons, shrines, or sites, they wander; albeit only within their own jurisdictions. Examining the resonance of Periyachi-the mother and midwife goddess-originally from rural Tamil Nadu and now in urban Singapore, I document the effects of dislocation from their homelands on intensely local …
Coercive gifts
This article considers the gift as a medium of politics in two parallel domains, namely the electoral and the ritual. Juxtaposing the material transactions during a rural election campaign and the distribution of meat after a sacrifice in a vernacular polity, it traces the continuing interpenetrations between philanthropy and politics in lubricating political associations. The properties of the political gift and the proprieties of its giving are…
Heartbreaking anthropology hurts
Ethnography involves using the self as the mechanism to try to understand others and their life worlds. How is knowledge and knowledge production affected by the apparatus of knowing, the ethnographer experiencing cataclysms in their personal life? In this article, I grapple with the fraught dilemmas of doing fieldwork on mother goddesses and ritual cults premised on the cultivation of fertility while experiencing infertility and undergoing assis…
Divali is for The Dead
In the face of orthodox ritual imperatives to alienate and render them ineffable, how are ancestors made present to and represented by their living kin, specifically during festivities? This article juxtaposes Divali’s customary overtones of triumph over evil and darkness and cultivations of prosperity with additional, if not alternative, associations with mortality, mourning, and memory in a village in Tamil Nadu. In delineating the funerary and…
Laying Out Feast-Offerings
In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on,…
More than Meets the Eye. The Political Causes of the Asian Economic Crisis
The Old Gods Are Losing Power
Some Hindus are killing animals in larger numbers, more regularly, and in more spectacular fashions than they have ever done before. In contradiction of the ethnographic record asserting the diminishing significance of ritual killing since the nineteenth century, sacrifices to tutelary deities that had long been abandoned are being reactivated or enacted for the first time. However, such a counter-intuitive surge in the popularity of sacrifices i…
Coercive gifts
This article considers the gift as a medium of politics in two parallel domains, namely the electoral and the ritual. Juxtaposing the material transactions during a rural election campaign and the distribution of meat after a sacrifice in a vernacular polity, it traces the continuing interpenetrations between philanthropy and politics in lubricating political associations. The properties of the political gift and the proprieties of its giving are…
Gods as Monsters
This chapter explores the interpenetrations between sacrality and monstrosity in a village in Tamil Nadu, India. Minis are amoral fertility spirits which must be appeased to secure agricultural productivity. Muniswarar is a tutelary deity who guards against chaos and evil. Unlike in other related disciplines, the monsters that anthropologists grapple with are not simply art or artifacts. They not only haunt imaginations but also prowl the land. T…
Delighting in kinship
This paper is about pleasure, specifically the pleasure that women take in kinship. Contrary to its diminished importance within the discipline, kinship still resonates strongly for many of our interlocutors. Why is kinship so captivating? Kinship’s continued significance, I argue, is attributable not so much to its utility or morality but to the pleasure it evokes. In capturing the major implications of kinship, anthropologists have barely consi…
Divali is for The Dead
In the face of orthodox ritual imperatives to alienate and render them ineffable, how are ancestors made present to and represented by their living kin, specifically during festivities? This article juxtaposes Divali’s customary overtones of triumph over evil and darkness and cultivations of prosperity with additional, if not alternative, associations with mortality, mourning, and memory in a village in Tamil Nadu. In delineating the funerary and…
Migrant Deities
What happens to deities when their devotees migrate? Village deities are wrought of a particular landscapes and a specific people. Refusing to remain rooted to icons, shrines, or sites, they wander; albeit only within their own jurisdictions. Examining the resonance of Periyachi-the mother and midwife goddess-originally from rural Tamil Nadu and now in urban Singapore, I document the effects of dislocation from their homelands on intensely local …
Touchable Gods
Village and tutelary deities have been characterized as fierce, capricious, or at least ambiguous. This article explores another facet of these polysemous divinities: their kinship with their adherents. Against the thrust of recent emphases on the gentrification of rural cults, the interventions of ritual specialists and the establishing of distance between deities and laity, these gods remain messily tactile and persist in being directly touchab…
Preserving Flesh and Spanning Families
“You always know when family is visiting from overseas. Outside their houses, threaded through twine and hung on fences and poles, will be chunks of goat meat and fish drying in the sun.”So ventured my mother’s sister, Chinnappa, who lives in Vaduvur, a village in central Tamil Nadu. In summer, temperatures in this village can rise to 45 degrees C (113 degrees F). So punishing is the sun that people try not to be outdoors between 10 am and 4 pm. …
Laying Out Feast-Offerings
In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on,…
Cooking Up a Distinctly Singaporean Tamil Cuisine
“Cheee, what is that stench?” exclaimed my mother-in-law, wrinkling her nose at the pungent fishy smell emanating from a neighbor’s kitchen. Visiting from Tamil Nadu, my mother-in-law was staying in our apartment in Singapore. Inhaling the scent appreciatively, I sighed, “That is the smell of toasting fermented shrimp paste (belacan in Malay) for making sambal (chili relish). I am so hungry.” Both my mother-in-law and I were born in rural Tamil N…
The sacred unbound
Dissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unexplained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically ac…
Heartbreaking anthropology hurts
Ethnography involves using the self as the mechanism to try to understand others and their life worlds. How is knowledge and knowledge production affected by the apparatus of knowing, the ethnographer experiencing cataclysms in their personal life? In this article, I grapple with the fraught dilemmas of doing fieldwork on mother goddesses and ritual cults premised on the cultivation of fertility while experiencing infertility and undergoing assis…
Centreing Women, Countering Killing
Some sacrifices are cosmogonic acts. Along with (re)creating the world, they create male social bonds by ritually appropriating and transcending women’s corporeal reproductive powers. Departing from these androcentric representations, this paper considers when, why and how (differently) women sacrifice. I compare an exclusively female domestic worship to the mother/midwife goddess Periyacci in Singapore from which men are forbidden with a male-ce…
Sacred Leftovers
“Open the front door! Open the main gate! Only then will they come into the house...accept our invitation to feast. Switch off the television! No distractions.” The guests my father eagerly awaited were his parents, along with his uncle (his father’s younger brother). My grandparents have been dead for more than three decades. Every year, several days before the festivals of Pongal and Deepavali, my family hosts a worship called “pataiyal” (feast…
Ambivalent Adi
This paper is a counternarrative to how the month of Adi is customarily depicted as wholly inauspicious and requiring avoidance of life cycle events. Instead, I foreground the explicitly polyvalent and especially ambivalent ways in which Adi is lived by Tamil Hindus. Adi is both an inauspiciously sterile and an intensely fertile period; marked simultaneously by sexual/domestic austerity, ritual proliferation, religious piety but also festivity an…
Reduced to a Generic Goddess
Through stories and storytelling, this article tells of how a popular Tamil goddess, Veeramakaliamman, is birthed, bodied, placed, and propelled across time and space. Four narratives—derived from ethnographic fieldwork, historic and journalistic accounts, folk narratives, and personal memories—present Veeramakaliamman’s origins in the Tamil Nadu district of Pudukkottai as well as charting her growth, travel, and eventual overseas settlement in S…
Domesticating the Cosmic
This article is about the calendrical, climactic and especially cosmological implications of Karthigai Deepam, an ancient Tamil celebration pivoted around the lighting of lamps that precedes Deepavali, the quintessential, ubiquitous but also comparatively recent festival of lights. Karthigai Deepam signals the end of the rains, intensifying winter chills and winds and shorter days. Juxtaposing festival observances in homes and those in temples, I…
Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 obras) · Art (11 obras) · Sociology (11 obras) · Tamil (11 obras) · History (9 obras) · Literature (9 obras) · Anthropology (7 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras) · Aesthetics (6 obras) · Law (6 obras)