Daughters of Parvati

Sarah Pinto is Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and author of Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India.

"Pinto's complex and moving ethnography explores women's lives in the context of different psychiatric care settings in a North Indian city. Woven together with Pinto's own experiences of love's breakdowns between India and Boston, Daughters of Parvati centres on the ways women take on the vulnerabilities and dependencies of marriage and family, and how psychiatric care, pharmaceuticals, and institutions mediate when relationships fall apart. [A]n illuminating ethnography [and] a complex and intimate example of feminist ethnography at its most vulnerable and powerful….[A] magisterial contribution to anthropological studies of global psychiatry and of kinship and care. It is also a moving and intimately reflexive book suggesting the power of ethnographic writing in its limits and possibilities." (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) ""[A] compelling ethnography about women's engagement with Western psychiatric care in North India. In bearing witness to the difficult lives of women on the verge of mental and relational breakdowns, Pinto offers a nuanced account of the gendered particularities of everyday psychiatric practice in India. Her observations of the Indian context open windows onto global anthropological debates about the ethics of institutional care and medical therapeutics, the vicissitudes of biopolitical power and subject making, and the challenges of reflexive research in conditions of human crises and abuses.…[S]ome of the most sophisticated anthropological writings on the subject." (American Anthropologist) "Daughters of Parvati is critical reading for scholars of medical anthropology, disability studies, genderand sexuality studies, and feminist methodologies...Pinto's work reveals not only the limits and constraints of our ethnographic methodologies (and, in turn, clinical and diagnostic settings) but also, crucially, their possibilities." (Isis) "One of the most compelling ethnographies I have read in recent years." (Veena Das, Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "A poignant, compelling, complex, and provocative example of anthropological storytelling. Based on original and evidently difficult fieldwork focused on the treatment of women's mental illnesses in north India, the book offers a gendered reading of psychiatry. It is also very much an intimate and intensely reflexive ethnography." (Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University) "An important book, making interventions in how we think about choreographies of clinical mental health work with families broken and repaired. Its ethnographic specificities have to do with India, but its accounts of medical, familial, and narrative crises are of broad theoretical import." (Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

• Note on TransliterationsIntroduction: Love and AfflictionChapter 1. Rehabilitating AmmiChapter 2. On DissolutionChapter 3. Moksha and MishappeningsChapter 4. On DissociationChapter 5. Making a CaseChapter 6. Ethics of DissolutionBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments