In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography. Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.
Описание: In the years leading up to India's independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. "Mrs A.'s" analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of their conversation, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.'s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of "counter-ethics". Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives, and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing ethics, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.
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