Abstract
This chapter presents a cultural model of wellbeing framed in terms of indigenous meanings that have salience in the temple town. The three measures that constitute wellbeing are the following: having control over one’s own activities and influence over others, being centrally involved in the household’s productive and distributive activities, and possessing psychological and moral coherence. The model implies that access to wellbeing is centrally linked to family role occupied; therefore, the experience of wellbeing shifts across the life course, being low in young adulthood, peaking in mature adulthood, and declining in old age. This connection between family role and access to wellbeing is best exemplified by the lack of wellbeing experienced by widows and married daughters who have returned permanently to their father’s homes—women who are cultural anomalies because they are not associated with any particular family role. The chapter also acknowledges that lived experience does not necessarily match the cultural model: even within a sample of just 37 women, there is intra-cultural variability with young adult women claiming to enjoy substantial wellbeing, while mature adult women claim not to.
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Notes
- 1.
Worshiping the sun at dawn and dusk is an important household ritual in the temple town. Together with other Hindus, Odias of the temple town believe that the sun, through the light and energy it radiates, propagates and preserves life.
- 2.
Guna Mahapatra was one of my primary sponsors in the temple town (see Chap. 2).
- 3.
Unit VI is a particular neighborhood in the modern city of Bhubaneswar, planned and built after 1948.
- 4.
In her description of her daily routine, Manjula says that she often asks her eldest son’s wife, “I ask purna bou, ‘What shall be cooked today?’ and she will say, ‘Let’s cook this and this and this’ and then, that’s what’s cooked.”
- 5.
Her husband’s mother tells me: “Purna bou, she gets me something to wear from the market. I never go to the market. I don’t even buy these glass bangles that I wear. She buys them for me and gives them to me to wear.”
- 6.
Again, her husband’s mother says of her eldest son’s wife: “Purna bou will arrange whatever food and drink are to be given and serve the guests.”
- 7.
I have more say about this issue in the next section in which I discuss women who appear to provide misleading wellbeing scores.
- 8.
The Odia language does not distinguish between male and female third person pronouns. I have translated the Odia pronoun “se” as “she,” but it refers to both men and women.
- 9.
Said loudly, these words illustrate how some older women I spoke with used the situation to communicate their displeasure to other members of the household.
- 10.
The scores point to a problem that afflicts much of social science research—how can one be sure that participants are being truthful in their responses? For my part, I think that ethnographic research, with its emphasis on fieldworkers building relationships with participants, has perhaps an advantage over other kinds of social science research in being able to detect a misleading response—but it is a problem that never really goes away.
- 11.
She is referring to Satyabhama here.
- 12.
She is referring to Jagannatha Nanada, her husband’s elder brother in whose house she lives.
- 13.
In houses in the temple town (Fig. 2.3), the kitchen is the enclosed space, which has a cooking hearth. But many activities involved with cooking, such as those of cutting vegetables, grinding masala, and sifting and washing rice and pulses to get rid of stones and other impurities, are done outside the kitchen in the inner courtyard. Odias distinguish between actual cooking and these other activities.
- 14.
She is referring to the room in which we were conversing—the room in which she sleeps these days.
- 15.
From what I could gather from our conversations, the marriage was never consummated and so, despite her style of dressing, she is not, and has never been, sexually active.
- 16.
In doing so, she follows many other very famous devotees in history—Mirabai, Chaitanya, Andal, to name just a few.
- 17.
Worship involving the waving of lighted oil lamps in front of the deity.
- 18.
Of course, Madan was describing the domestic life of male householders; Snehalata is neither male nor is she a housewife in the traditional sense.
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Menon, U. (2013). The Auspicious Heart: Influence, Productivity, and Coherence. In: Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0885-3_7
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