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Death, Beauty, Struggle represents a long labor of love and the
summation of forty years of Margaret Trawick's groundbreaking
research. Centering her gaze on the lowest castes of India, now
called Dalits, she describes the experience of women at this
precarious level who are still treated as sub-human, sometimes by
family members, sometimes by higher-caste men. Their private
worlds, however, are full of art; rural Dalit women sing beautiful
songs of their own making and tell remarkable narratives of their
own lives. Much that Tamil women shared with Trawick is rooted in
the passionate attachments and acute wounds generated within
families, but these women's voices resonate well beyond
individually circumscribed lives. In their songs and life stories
they critique social, political, economic, and domestic
oppressions. They also incorporate visions of natural beauty and
immanent divinity. Trawick presents Tamil women's words as relevant
to universal human themes. Trawick's frames of analysis, developed
throughout her long career of fieldwork in India, inform her
ethnography of expressive culture. The songs and stories of Dalit
women were recorded and transcribed, to be translated into lyrical
passages in her own work. Death, Beauty, Struggle demonstrates a
conviction that persons without privilege-from the rape victim to
the landless laborer-possess both power and agency. Through verbal
arts, Dalit women produce not only acute cultural critiques but
also astonishing beauty.
Love, as a force in human affairs, is still not given much
attention or credency by social scientists. With Notes on Love in a
Tamil Family, Margaret Trawick places the notion of love
prominently in social scientific discourse. Her unforgettable and
profusely illustrated study is a significant contribution to
anthropology and to South Asian studies. Trawick lived for a time
in the midst of one large South Indian family and sought to
understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of
anpu--what in English we call love. Often enveloping the author
herself, changing her as she inevitably changed her hosts, this
family performed before the young anthropologist's eyes the meaning
of anpu: through poetry and conversation, through the not always
gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship
tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and
across the great sexual boundary. She communicates with grace and
insight what she learned from this Tamil family, and we discover
that love is no less universal than selfishness and individualism.
"Enemy Lines "captures the extraordinary story of boys and girls
coming of age during a civil war. Margaret Trawick lived and worked
in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka, where thousands of youths have
been recruited into the Sri Lankan armed resistance movement known
as the Tamil Tigers. This compelling account of her experiences is
a powerful exploration of how children respond to the presence of
war and how adults have responded to the presence of children in
this conflict. Her beautifully written account, which includes
voices of the teenagers and young adults who have joined the Tamil
Tigers, brings alive a region where childhood, warfare, and play
have become commingled in a world of continuous uncertainty.
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