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What is relatedness and how is it created? Describe two examples from the readings that showhow relatedness works for people in South Asia. Compare and contrast the examples toelaborate one important aspect of relatedness. What do you think we can learn from thiscomparison about how relatedness can interact with gender and sexuality? (For example: inyour examples, does relatedness shape sexuality? Or, does gender shape the kinds ofrelatedness a person can engage in? Or, is relatedness how people enact a gender? Or, arerelatedness, gender, and sexuality unconnected?)● relatedness-A word that anthropologists use to describe socially recognized ties orconnections● It can be created through marriage and through intimate interactions● “In folk theories of Indian kinship, by contrast, substance and code are more explicitlyimbricated in one another since kinship substances are understood as malleable, notbiologically determined or fixed. People develop relatedness through intimateinteractions, including breastfeeding, sex, and eating, during which organic substances,like breastmilk, semen, and food, are shared”-Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor● “Anthropoligists approach these organic substances as cultural phenomena that peopleuse to define both the closeness of individual relations and larger socialhierarchies”-Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor● “Most scholars working on conceptions of the family and kinship in India have focusedon marriage or alliance as the fulcrum of relatedness and the central institution of kinshiprelations. This is especially true of South India, where every conceivable pattern ofdescent and form of marriage is represented”-Our people-kinship, marriage, familyThroughout this course we have read examples of people creating, arguing about, trying tofollow, and diverging from “normal” expectations about sexuality and gender. Describe twoexamples from the course materials in which people are engaging with norms about gender andsexuality in some way. (Your description might consider what the “norms” are in the givensituation, how the people involved know what they are, how people try to enforce the norms,how people try to resist the norms, or how people try to change the norms or createalternatives.) Then, compare and contrast your examples. In your view, what can thiscomparison teach us about gender and/or sexuality in South Asia?● Two examples of engaging with norms about gender and sexuality include same-sexmarriages and the sexual spatiality of public spaces● “For example, in November 2006, papers reported that two Kondh tribal women, hadmarried each other in a village in Orissa. The reporter emphasized that they had deniedcommunity norms.”-same-sex weddings, Hindu traditions● “The phenomenon of same-sex marriages is new in tribal society. Tribal tradition is totallyopposed to same-sex marriages”-same-sex weddings, Hindu traditions● “In October 2007, two young women, got married in a temple in the presence ofVaralakshmi’s mother and another witness. When the church found out about theirintimacy, they were dismissed from their jobs. They then found work in a nursery andrented an apartment”-same-sex weddings, Hindu traditions● “Foucault brought out the dichotomies of spaces, and challenged the socially givenopposition to spatial concepts like public and private, family and social space”-Eroticdesires and practices● “Findings from this study show how within cyberspace, the public and private life overlap,intertwine and make erotic desires and identities deeply unstable, permeable, inexact,and ambigious-Erotic desires and


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BU AAAS 284A - Notes

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