Im/possible lives

Gender, class, self-fashioning, and affinal solidarity in modern South Asia

Bibliographic Data

ID2965666
AuthorsCoralynn V Davis (Bucknell University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume15
Issue2
Pages243-272
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1350-4630 • E-ISSN: 1363-0296
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13504630902778701
OpenAlexW2029488977
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited66

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila, South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the 'modern' selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means. In the context of shifting cultural anchors, new practices of silence, literacy, and even behaviors interpreted as 'mental illness' may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting self-representations. The confluence of forces at play in contemporary Mithila, moreover, is creating new structures of feeling that may begin to reverse long-standing locally held assumptions about strong solidarities between natal families and daughters, on the one hand, and weak solidarities between affinal families and new daughters-in-law, on the other

Aesthetics · Caste · Context (archaeology · Modernity · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Solidarity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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