Water and Gender in Recreating Family Life with Maa Ganga: The Confluence of Nature and Culture in a North Indian River Pilgrimage

Revaluing Gender and Religion in the Anthropological Debate of the Anthropocene: A Critique on the Threefold Culture–Nature–Supernature Divide

“…We found that moving away from anthropocentrism and studying more-than-human relatedness in anthropology apparently implies a disregard of gender, a disregard that concerns both the 'human' and the 'non-human' in their mutual relationships. Assuming that 'nature is always implicit in the making of social life' (Hastrup 2014) and that 'the concept of sociality does not distinguish between human and non-human' (Tsing 2014, p. 27), we believe that expressions of gender in more-than-human social relatedness cannot be denied (see also : Notermans and Pfister 2016;Govindrajan 2018;Helmreich 2017;Hovorka 2012;Saugeres 2002). Simultaneously, we found that Anthropocene scholarship tends to focus on secular contexts, as well as to implicitly rely on secular worldviews, thus drawing and reproducing ontological borders, not only between 'culture' and 'nature', but also between 'nature' and 'supernature'.…”

Prayers of Cow Dung: Women Sculpturing Fertile Environments in Rural Rajasthan (India)

“…Although this may be the outcome of local research on gendered divisions of tasks and responsibilities in private and public spaces in the 1980s and 1990s, it also may reflect dominant (traditional) western and (priestly) male assumptions about Hindu women's confinement to the home. To this perspective I would like to add a gender perspective that connects with (feminist) anthropologists' scholarship challenging the stereotype image of the subordinated and secluded North Indian woman (e.g., Gold 1988;Harlan 1991;Jeffery 1979;Jeffery and Jeffery 2018;Pintchman 2005Pintchman , 2007Raheja and Gold 1994) and is based on my research in Rajasthan (e.g., Notermans and Pfister 2016). In my opinion, women's Govardhan puja in rural Udaipur today, in both its public location and its outward orientation towards the natural environment, allows a gender perspective that goes beyond women's domestic domain and values the vital contributions women make to the rural economy and the sustenance of the environment that humans and non-humans share.…”