Who and what are marriage and sex for? Whose practices and which
ways of talking to god can count as religion? Lucinda Ramberg
considers these questions based on two years of ethnographic
research on an ongoing South Indian practice of dedication in which
girls, and sometimes boys, are married to a goddess. Called
"devadasis," or "jogatis," those dedicated become female and male
women who conduct the rites of the goddess outside the walls of her
main temple and transact in sex outside the bounds of conjugal
matrimony. Marriage to the goddess, as well as the rites that the
dedication ceremony authorizes "jogatis" to perform, have long been
seen as illegitimate and criminalized. Kinship with the goddess is
productive for the families who dedicate their children, Ramberg
argues, and yet it cannot conform to modern conceptions of gender,
family, or religion. This nonconformity, she suggests, speaks to
the limitations of modern categories, as well as to the
possibilities of relations--between and among humans and
deities--that exceed such categories.
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