Domestic Goddesses

Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.

Dr Henrike Donner's research explores the interplay of gender, kinship and reproductive change in relation to class and post-liberalisation policies. Since 1995 she has conducted fieldwork in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, which has focused on the transformation of marriage and conjugal ideals, medicalised birth and maternal bodies, food consumption and the impact of privatised healthcare and schooling on middle-class lifestyles. Her work is concerned with socio-economic change as part of the process of globalisation and the way class is reproduced through institutions like marriage and the family and constituted through gendered, everyday practices. She has also published on urban space and fieldwork in the postcolonial city. Her ongoing research deals with the legacy of the militant Naxalite movement that emerged in urban West Bengal and is concerned with personal experiences of radical politics in the 1970s.