Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India

Contemporary Ethnography

by Sarah Pinto

Awarded the 2014 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology division of the American Anthropological Association 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.

Genres: Anthropology

296 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 2014

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for seminar on critical reading in social anthropology. Fascinating ethnographic topic, ambivalent re: the structure of the ethnography in relation to the thematic consideration. I get that she's emphasizing the dissolution of narrative but I think it undermines her arguments and ignores some of the power differential between her as the anthropologist and the patients in the wards.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read at all but very insightful and interesting however some of the tangents the author goes on are a bit unnecessary.

[Renice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not an easy read but then it is about mental health, one of the most fluid, misunderstood and hard to grasp concept. The author wrote herself in the book nicely and those moments not only provided reprieve from the vocabularies of mental illness but also moments of clarity.
Sarah Pinto makes an invitation to consider an additional method of witnessing in spaces of failed mental health where limits of language can be felt, a necessity in fact “to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we are seeing everything” (Pinto 2014:121). This invitation is about delving down into mental illness abysses, embracing the nuances, the nothingness, the glimpses and the contradictions that arise from representing the narrative within the confines of language. The holes, the gaps, the lapses and the unknowns that exist in the experiences of the subject may seem to be void but they are not nothing. It is perfectly okay, even vital for the narrator to infuse absences into the narrative because some lives “are only accessible in glimpses” (56) and adding words to the fill the gaps while gives an illusion of narrative completeness, may ironically function to silence or even alter the actual experiences. The silences introduced by such absences speak profound volumes where words may never reach. Not all stories can be completed or fully comprehended yet anthropologists must bear witness of ‘unfinished and unfinishable stories’ (5) striving to represent the broken bodies, broken relations and broken pieces of narrative in their truest form possible

[Possum P · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have such a hard time figuring out how I feel about this book. On the one hand, she does have some profound insights, and she writes beautifully. On the other, it's obvious that she's rightly uncertain about anthropology as a discipline, her place within that, and how much she can trust her own interpretations. She makes vague gestures toward the matrix within which these situations are occurring but rather than explore that, she indulges her need to lay herself bare (but can't even go all the way with that). She always hesitates right at the cusp of actually coming to a conclusion. I guess her collapsing marriage does explain her uncertainty but what are the material bases for the suffering she witnessed? How does imperialism use culturally relevant ideology to bind these women into impossible situations? Does the author even consider that? Does she even care? Or would it implicate her?