Given to the Goddess

Lucinda Ramberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.

“This excellent book makes a significant contribution to religion and kinship, gender, sexuality, and South Asian studies…. Highly recommended.” - D. A. Chekki (Choice) “This is a beautifully written and theoretically engaged ethnography about a community whose past has been fraught and whose future lies in the balance. It would be appropriate reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of gender, sexuality, kinship, religion, and modernity in India.” - Cecilia Van Hollen (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "We must dwell with, as Given to the Goddess gracefully does, the everyday experiences of devotion, exchange, and one’s social relationship to another-human, nonhuman, or even goddess-that make us, quite simply, kin." - Durba Mitra (GLQ) "Ramberg’s work exemplifies an extraordinary synthesis of animated empiricism and theoretical rigor. It is heartening to mark the arrival of this very important work that signals a critical departure in several ways." - Priyadarshini Vijaisri (Anthropos)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Gods, Gifts, Trouble 1Part I. Gods 1. Yellamma and Her Sisters: Kinship among Goddesses and Others 392. Yellamma, Her Wives, and the Question of Religion 71Part II. Gifts 3. Tantra, Shakta, Yellamma 1134. The Giving of Daughters: Sexual Economy, Sexual Agency, and the "Traffic" in Women 142Part III. Trouble 5. Kinship Trouble 1816. Troubling Kinship 213Notes 223Glossary 247Bibliography 251Index 270