Learning and Embodying Caste, Class and Gender: Patterns of Childhood in Rural Tamil Nadu by Gabriele Alex
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Learning and Embodying Caste, Class and Gender
Patterns of Childhood in Rural Tamil Nadu
Ritual, Kinship, Gender, and Education among Vagri, Mutturājā and Kaúúar
By Gabriele Alex
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About the Book
This book is based on ethnographic research carried out mainly among children and youths of different status groups in a rural low caste village in the Tañcāvūr district in Tamil Nadu, South India. It takes a new approach by investigating the phase of pre-adulthood under the heading of the classical anthropological themes, but also by making children informants and contrasting their viewpoints to those of their parents and grandparents generation. It adds a new perspective on the current debates on children and childhood in South Asia by providing an ethnographic study thus offering an emic perspective on the concepts and life worlds of Tamil children. By this means Western categories and assumptions on what childhood is and how it should be are questioned and challenged. Emphasising the fact that, depending on factors such as caste and class, gender and ethnicity there are many childhoods, these specific ethnographic insights deconstruct ideas of a pan Indian model of childhood.
Gabriele Alex is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She is currently working on medical diversity in Tamil Nadu, South India.
She obtained her Masters degree in Medical Anthropology and her PhD in Social Anthropology both from Brunel University, West London. Until she joined the Max Planck Institute she was Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Master Program Health and Society in South Asia at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Before this she worked as a full time Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Münster, Germany. She has also taught at the Department of Tropical Hygiene and Public Health in Heidelberg in the Master Program
Dr. Alex’s research interests concern medical anthropology, ethnicity, healing and identity, and youth India and Germany. She is currently involved in research on medical pluralism and health seeking behavior in a comparative perspective.
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Situating children in everyday life
Chapter 4 Childhood Ritualsl
Chapter 5 Children in Kinship
Chapter 6 Gender, Romance and Sexuality
Chapter 7 Work, School and the Politics of Education
Chapter 8 Conclusion
Appendix
Glossary
References and Literature
