Heroic Wives Rituals, Stories and the Virtues of Jain Wifehood

Rituals, stories, and the virtues of Jain wifehood

Bibliographic Data

ID7099824
AuthorsMary Whitney Kelting
Year2009
Publication date2009-10-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueHeroic wives (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389647.001.0001
OpenAlexW578698595
ISBN9780195389647
Open LibraryOL23057953M
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Being a good Jain woman involves negotiating between the mutually exclusive ideologies found in the South Asian discourse of devoted wifehood and in the Jain discourse of renunciation. This book draws from a diverse collection of oral tellings, popular tracts, songs, verse narratives, fasting rituals, religious dramas, and large‐scale worship to provide new perspectives on the inherent tension between these ideologies and the space that tension creates for laywomen's agency. Heroic Wives suggests that women creatively and selectively negotiate their identities as wives at different moments on the trajectory of wifehood. In part I, women in established marriages use piety and ritual practices to protect their husband's health, to transform bad marriages into good ones, and to create and maintain ideal marriages. Part II examines how Jains reconfigure the relationship between wifehood and renunciation: on one hand, reconciling the two through stories of renunciation as a form of devoted wifehood, and, on the other, deploying the discourse of both in order to construct their identities as women who don't renounce, but instead choose to become wives. On a broader level, Heroic Wives discusses Jain narrative/ritual complexes as the site of laywomen's negotiations between multiple discourses that shape their thinking about wifehood, and in this context, Jain women position themselves as the agents of their futures. This book provides new perspectives on the experience of wifehood, South Asian women's lives, and Jain religious practices and narratives. It further advances ongoing dialogues about interactions of ritual, narrative, selfhood, and identity

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Identity (music · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Negotiation · Piety · Political science · Politics · Renunciation · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · conduct of life · India · Jaina women · Jainism · Marriage · Marriage, religious aspects · Religious aspects · Religious aspects of Marriage · Rituals · Wives · Women · Women in Jainism · Religious Studies

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