Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780812245837)

In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography.

Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

Author: Sarah Pinto
ISBN-10: 0812245830
ISBN-13: 9780812245837
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Language: English
Published: 02/14/2014
Pages: 296
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 03/21/2014 pg. 16