Culture in Action: Family Life, Emotion, and Male Dominance in Banaras, India

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SUNY Press, 1995 M01 1 - 232 pages
In Culture in Action Derne explores the interconnections between male dominance, joint-family living, Indian emotional life, and a cultural focus on group pressures. Derne emphasizes the Hindu focus on the social group, but shows that men often distance themselves from group culture by marrying for love, separating from their parents, or embracing closeness with their wives.

Derne's suggestion that Indian men's cultural focus on the group limits men's and women's strategies for breaking cultural norms offers a new approach to understanding how culture constrains. He shows how the child-rearing practices and emotional tensions associated with joint-family living shape Indians' group emphasis. This approach suggests that the Hindu focus on the group is intimately connected with male dominance.

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Contents

Until recently the dominant perspective in the social sciences
2
One reason that 35yearold RP Mishra
16
Rajesh Yadav 27 enjoys wearing stylish Westernized clothes
38
Several men who consent enthusiastically to having their marriages
68
Nandu Gupta a 35yearold high
84
While bringing him tea Lakshmi Mishra jokes with her
106
While the threat of dishonor is an important constraint
122
In this chapter I explore the uneven hold of
142
So far I have emphasized how practices associated with
156
Catherine Lutz 1988 urges a focus on ethnopsychology
168
NOTES
181
BIBLIOGRAPHY
199
Copyright

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Page 206 - Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Pp. 412-453 in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic . 1973d. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.
Page xii - All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright-holder and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India. Dawa Norbu, 'After Nationalism? Elite Beliefs, State Interests, and International Polities'.
Page xiii - The vowels a, i, u, e, ai, o, au are long, and have approximately the same pronunciation as in Italian, or as the vowels in the English words calm, machine, rule, prey, time, go and cow, respectively. A, i, u are short, and equivalent to the vowels in the English words cut, bit and bull. The reader should avoid the temptation to pronounce a as in English sat.

About the author (1995)

Steve Derne is Assistant Professor of Sociology at State University of New York, College at Geneseo. He received the Society for Psychological Anthropology's 1991 Stirling Award for his work on family structure and self-conceptions.

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