Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and Postcolonial Reform in South India

Abstract

This paper offers an ethnography of the medicalization of matted locks of hair (jade) worn by female ecstatics in a South Indian devi (goddess) cult. These jade are taken by devotees of the devi Yellamma to be a manifestation of her presence in the bodies of women who enter possession states and give oracles. At her temples across the central Deccan Plateau, Yellamma women can be seen wearing heavy locks of matted hair anointed with turmeric, the color and healing properties of which are identified with this devi. Under a recent government-sponsored campaign, reformers cut jade and hand out packets of shampoo as a means of reforming the extended and illicit sexuality of these women. Associations between sexuality and hair practices have long preoccupied anthropologists interested in the relationship between the body and culture. In this paper, I draw on this literature and more than 2 years of field research to consider the encounter between biomedical and Shakta epistemologies of the body dramatized in these jade cutting campaigns. This effort to remake the body as a fit site and sign of modernity elaborates the postcolonial politics of sexuality, gender and religiosity in India.

Negotiating ritual duty in degenerate times: The goddess Mathamma and the legal secular in rural South India

“…The nature of these reform programs has been described in some detail by Lucinda Ramberg (2009), who worked with a similar community of dedicated women in Karnataka state.…”

“…Dedicated women are encouraged to dress modestly, to pay attention to their physical hygiene, to educate their children, and, above all, to cut their ties with the goddess by discontinuing their ritual roles and marrying a "suitable" man. 5 Existing scholarship (Anandhi 1991;de Bruin 2004;Jordan 1993;Kannabiran 1995;Nair 1994;Parker 1998;Ramberg 2009Ramberg , 2013Ramberg , 2014Vijaysri 2004;Whitehead 1998), characterizes the sociolegal curtailment of the Devadasi custom(s), in both the colonial and postcolonial period, as a discourse of constraint that serves to marginalize subaltern, nonnormative communities and practices, even as it offers conditional entrance into the body of the nationstate. Much like comparable scholarship on colonial and postcolonial social and legal reform specifically affecting Indian women (N. S.…”

Spiritual hair: dreadlocks and the bodies multiple in Rastafari

“…Ramberg (2009: 511) suggests that a legacy of colonial medicine has situated the ‘native body’ as being in need of (European) civilization and secularized it to be a biological, rather than a spiritual, entity. But even (or especially) under conditions of oppression, matted hair remains a source of spiritual power in the African diaspora.…”

“…While Obeyesekere interpreted his reaction as a primal castration fear associated with Medusa (and suggested that matted hair is symbolic of snakes as well as genitalia), he acknowledged that such symbols can also have meaning on a conscious, personal level. Sometimes this is related to sexual reproduction: for example, matted hair is a symbol of fertility and well‐being to women who ‘marry’ the goddess Yellama in South India (Ramberg 2009). However, matted hair as a conscious, personal symbol may have completely other meanings.…”