Dissertation Research: Ritual Identity and Role Conflict in South India

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This project involves the dissertation research of a student from Emory University. The study involves the tension between ideology and behavioral practices in a community of religious practitioners in a city of south India. Practitioners of this sect sacrifice their male reproductive organs to their religion, cross-dressing and conducting religious rites to confer fertility upon their patrons who hire them to conduct religious rituals. The efficacy of the rituals is spiritually connected to the practitioner's renunciation of their own sexuality Preliminary research has shown that a portion of the religious practitioners act as commercial sex workers Using a combination of surveys and intensive interviews as well as ethnographic observation, the student will examine the tension between the sexual renunciation and the income-producing practices of individual members of the community as these affect their social status. This project is important because it increases knowledge about this important region of the world, as well as advances our understanding of basic processes relating community social status, personal income and ritual purity in this non-Western setting.