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Heroic wives : rituals, stories, and the virtues of Jain wifehood by Mary Whitney Kelting; American Council of Learned Societies is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Heroic wives : rituals, stories, and the virtues of Jain wifehood about?

## Abstract Being a good Jain woman involves negotiating between the mutually exclusive ideologies found in the South Asian discourse of devoted wifehood and in the Jain discourse of renunciation. This book draws from a diverse collection of oral tellings, popular tracts, songs, verse narratives, fasting rituals, religious dramas, and large‐scale worship to provide new perspectives on the inherent tension between these ideologies and the space that tension creates for laywomen's agency. Heroic Wives suggests that women creatively and selectively negotiate their identities as wives at different moments on the trajectory of wifehood. In part I, women in established marriages use piety and ritual practices to protect their husband's health, to transform bad marriages into good ones, and to create and maintain ideal marriages. Part II examines how Jains reconfigure the relationship between wifehood and renunciation: on one hand, reconciling the two through stories of renunciation as a form of devoted wifehood, and, on the other, deploying the discourse of both in order to construct their identities as women who don't renounce, but instead choose to become wives. On a broader level, Her

Who reads Heroic wives : rituals, stories, and the virtues of Jain wifehood?

Author

Mary Whitney Kelting; American Council of Learned Societies

Publisher

Oxford University PressNew York

Published

2009

Language

EN

ISBN

9780199736799

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Religion, Sacred Texts