Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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and Mortal Biographies
Sarasvati, through taped interviews as well as through conversations, showed me something I had never thought of before, which was that the woman and the spirit she worshipped had been through similar life experiences, in particular, problems with men. Māriamman was, then, a model of what Sarasvati experienced herself to be, and was struggling with Sarasvati, forcing her, to do what Māriamman in her life story had finally achieved. (Chapter 1)
In a compelling portrait of the priestess Sarasvati and the goddess Māriamman, Trawick shows us in Chapter 1 how closely intertwined the life stories of deity and devotee can be. Māriamman even grants Trawick, the young American anthropologist, an interview, speaking through the possessed body of her mortal medium. Māriamman literally rules Sarasvati’s life in that she presents her with rules that must be followed. But she also endows her human vehicle with a financial and emotional stability that the priestess had not known in her life’s struggles before her own being became so thoroughly intertwined with that of the mother goddess. In Sarasvati’s case, however counterintuitive, to be possessed is to be, if not liberated, then at least relieved of some daunting hardships. It also enables her to help others deal with their own difficulties in life.
In Chapter 4, a woman with tuberculosis whose name is Kanyammā, which is also the name of a local goddess, sings songs about that goddess. She laments the goddess’s decline, equated with environmental decline. Kanyammā the woman also sings of the attractive power of the virgin goddess in the form of a girl wearing flowers in her hair. Their fragrance is irresistible, a botanical source of divine as well as human allure (for Tamil women customarily wear fresh flowers in their hair). Trawick concludes about one of Kanyammā’s songs that it suggests “a place where a woman is on top” (Chapter 4). That place is on the edge of the village settlement. In many rural South Indian communities, goddesses are regularly enshrined a bit beyond human habitations, a bit apart from the messy and imperfect human world. The exception of course is when they choose to enter someone’s body as was the case with Māriamman, who possessed the priestess Sarasvati and intervened in hers and many others’ everyday lives to alleviate their sufferings.5
Unrepentant Anthropology
During one of my unpolluted spells I went to visit Chandra, and I found that she was now observing her time of impurity, so I went out back to where she was staying. we had been sitting alone together for some time when suddenly—defying the Brahminical rule which demands that during her menstrual period a woman shall touch no one—Chandra grabbed my hand, tightly, saying nothing.
Our friendship intensified at that moment, and I realized that this too was a great source of śakti. (Trawick [Egnor] 1980, 28)
The words with which I epitomize my closing filament come not from this book but from Trawick’s earliest publication (1980). They evoke for me the intimacy, the connection, the embodiedness at the heart of Trawick’s anthropology and of Death, Beauty, Struggle.
Rather than a disembodied authorial voice, Trawick gives us presence—her own thoroughly embodied presence. Among observant high-caste South Indian Hindu families menstrual taboos would cause a woman literally to be “not in the house” monthly. Trawick as a good participant observer was trying to live by the same rules as her hosts.6 But in an unexpected place she encountered transgression, and here she celebrates it. In a way, inspired by her Tamil friend, Trawick breaks disciplinary taboos, speaking of her own bodily processes and acknowledging in her friend’s cross-cultural gesture that the presence of an anthropologist sometimes opens up a space for counter-currents in a cultural universe. In 1981, when I was just back from my doctoral fieldwork, it was genuinely momentous to encounter in Trawick’s published anthropology such a strong human voice, true to her lived experience. For me fieldwork had never been about gathering and analyzing data but rather about forging relationships. Reading Trawick enabled me to acknowledge this in my own writing.7
Trawick’s anthropology never apologizes for its humanity, its unabashed incorporation of anthropologist as person into the text, sometimes recursively as when Kanyammā sings about Trawick:
When they see you, desire takes hold.
When they see you, desire takes hold.
When one sees the West, it seems very far away.
It comes bearing thunder and lightning.
When one sees the West, it seems very far away.
It comes bearing thunder and lightning. (Chapter 4)
Commenting on these lines, Trawick writes, “Just as thunder and lightning coming from the faraway West must have been seen as fearsomely powerful, and capable of boding great good or great ill, so perhaps I was perceived. Although I just wanted to be a normal person there and melt into the everyday life of the village, that was not possible” (Chapter 4). Here she speaks for quite a few anthropologists perpetually chagrined by their proverbial sore thumb outsider status, by a desire for affirmed if ineffable belonging, by the burden of too many visibly attractive material belongings.
Trawick’s anthropology demonstrates a conviction that persons without privilege—from the menstruating woman isolated in her hut, to the rape victim, to the gypsy peddler, to the landless laborer—possess both power and agency. Through verbal arts oppressed persons produce acute cultural critiques and also beauty. Trawick simply assumes these are persons worth hearing, that their words are worth the labor of a loving translation and that they have much to teach us. Such assumptions might be the purported stock in trade of our beloved, maligned anthropology, but they are rarely put into practice with such a delicate mix of humility and eloquence as that offered in Trawick’s writings.
For the 2012 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association I organized a panel honoring Trawick’s contributions. Lawrence Cohen’s paper used appropriately enigmatic poetic language to characterize Trawick’s work, speaking of her “demonic rigor” and asserting that her writing is “asli” (Hindi, ‘real’), in that she “crosses the line into a space marked by beauty but also hurt, chaos, and indeed death.” One discussant, Anand Pandian, spoke of “the liquid appeal of that anthropological imagination that Trawick’s work encourages us to exercise.” He likens this “liquid appeal” to an attitude he learned from his grandfather, who would speak of his lack of fear under many trying circumstances including drinking water from dirty ditches: “What I learned, listening to my grandfather, is that there is health, as well as danger, in breaching the boundaries of the self” (Pandian 2012; see also Pandian and Mariappan 2014).8
Prompted by these appreciations, I slip, in conclusion, from a trope of light to one of liquid. I urge readers of this wonderful book to sip or gulp from the real, demonic, transgressive fount of Margaret Trawick’s anthropology and the voices of South Indian women transmitted here. I hope readers will imbibe with these healthy draughts the energy to cross the lines and breach the boundaries, in modes that are not invasive but incorporative.
Preface
The fieldwork that resulted in this book was done intermittently from 1975 to 1991 while I was engaged in other projects in Tamil Nadu. The study for the book and the writing of it have been done continuously until now. Emergent from this work has been, among other things, a picture of how the government of India, and the British colonial government before it, tried to freeze groups of people in particular times, places, and occupations. Some are categorized as “Backward.” Others categorize themselves as “Forward.” Others are considered untouchable and categorized as “Scheduled Castes” or “Scheduled Tribes.” All the castes are ranked against each other.