Specialties

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India, in an ashram for women living unattached to men after a spouse’s death, divorce, separation, or because of the choice or compulsion to remain unmarried, my dissertation responds to the question: What is it like for women in this place and at this time—sensorially, emotionally, physically, intellectually—to live unattached from men? Even as the capacious signpost of “widowhood” allowed women to enter and live in this ashram, it often failed to describe, in biographical or emotional terms, the world of the ashram itself, or the deeply felt differences among the people who lived there. If not through the prism of “widowhood,” then, a category of person that indexes a relationship to absent men and to the state’s promise of caretaking for the vulnerable, how did the women in this ashram imagine and make sense of they are, were, and might yet become?