Troubling kinship: sacred marriage and gender configuration in South India

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8034.2025.e108876

Keywords:

Devadasis, Gender, Kinship, Marriage, South Asia, Value

Abstract

Patterns of kin-making among devadasis in northern Karnataka pose problems for anthropological charting of kinship and for state projects of family normalization. Given to the goddess Yellamma by her family in a rite of marriage, a devadasi becomes a person who is both a woman and a son. Such a person cannot be mapped within a structuralist calculus of kin in which every position is always already gendered. I elaborate kin-making as a technology for producing gender and value in persons who can inhabit, but may confound, alignments between sex, gender, and kin position that have been smuggled into the anthropological project as kinship.

Author Biographies

Bruno Reinhardt, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Doutor em Antropologia pela Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley, e professor do Departamento de Antropologia da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Suas pesquisas e publicações têm se concentrado na antropologia da religião e do secularismo e na antropologia política, com trabalhos etnográficos realizados no Brasil e em Gana.

Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University

Antropóloga médica e sociocultural e pesquisadora interdisciplinar cujo trabalho se situa na intersecção entre teoria feminista, pós-colonial e queer; estudos sobre religião e secularismo; antropologia da medicina e do corpo; e estudos do Sul da Ásia. Suas pesquisas, realizadas no sul da Índia e nos Estados Unidos, derivam de um engajamento de longa duração com as políticas da sexualidade, do gênero e da religião. Seu primeiro livro, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014) recebeu o Michelle Rosaldo Prize de melhor primeiro livro em antropologia feminista, o Ruth Benedict Prize da Association for Queer Anthropology e o Clifford Geertz Prize de melhor livro em antropologia da religião concedido pela Society for the Anthropology of Religion.

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Published

2026-07-06

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REINHARDT, Bruno; RAMBERG, Lucinda. Troubling kinship: sacred marriage and gender configuration in South India. Ilha Revista de Antropologia, Florianópolis, v. 27, n. 3, 2026. DOI: 10.5007/2175-8034.2025.e108876. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ilha/article/view/108876. Acesso em: 11 jul. 2026.

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Vol. 27 No. 3 (2025)

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