Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village (review)

In this engaging and eminently readable ethnography, talented storyteller Diane P. Mines draws her audience into everyday life in the South Indian village of Yanaimangalam. Lively characters from diverse groups within the village create a compelling, multiperspective account of caste, religion, and village conflict. Consistent voices include Mines's elderly Brahmin neighbor who talks nostalgically about how things "used to be," Mines's low caste research associate who laments that painful caste inequalities never change, a member of the dominant Thevar caste who speaks of village improvements, and a passionate leader from the Scheduled Caste (Untouchable) hamlet on the periphery of the main village. Mines's own voice combines humble tales of awkward encounters with the confident authority of twenty years of cross-cultural expertise, highlighting the learning process in ethnographic fieldwork. Overall, this tightly woven, superbly crafted volume draws the reader gently into the heart of life in Tamil Nadu. The book heralds a renaissance of village anthropology, presenting a sophisticated examination of caste and religious practice against a background of Tamil concepts of self, village, and the wider world.

The first half of the book describes dynamics of village inclusion and exclusion acted out in everyday interpersonal encounters and in more formal temple festivals and life-crisis rituals. Mines begins with a vignette about the turmoil incited when a Scheduled Caste man takes a pinch of ash from the shrine of the village goddess. Four chapters carefully unpack for the reader the multiple social structures that bear on the case, examining national, regional, and historic caste relations, cross-caste interdependence and patronage in Yanaimangalam, and Tamil theories of individual qualities and habits. Exquisitely detailed ethnographic material illustrates how social interactions make and remake distinctions in rank and define group boundaries of caste, age, and gender. Refuting older views of caste, Mines argues that hierarchies are not fixed, timeless, or clear cut, but are instead ceaselessly produced and reproduced. She also shows that identities are irrevocably relational and based on social action.

The four chapters in the second half of the book focus on ritual activities. Mines describes a religious pantheon with beneficent, calm Brahmanical gods linked to the "great" tradition of Indian civilization; village goddesses responsible for the fertility of soil, humans, and animals; and unpredictable, peripheral "fierce" gods who are in turn protective and cruel. Temple associations organize events for village goddesses and fierce gods in Yanaimangalam. Densely crowded, elaborate activities illustrate the unity and popularity of the associations and the generosity and wealth of the individuals involved, enhancing their reputations. Mines argues that temple festivals (particularly processions) publicly display organizers' view of social relations within the whole village. Of each festival, Mines asks who forms part of the "whole" and what territory counts as "the village." She examines how festivals are staged in competitive conversation with each other, presenting alternative concepts of village and belonging.

The annual goddess festival generally reinforces the status of the dominant castes in the village. Mines shows how festivals for village goddesses display social order (of lineages, castes, temple associations, and villages) and can reinforce relations of dominance and subordination. But in Yanaimangalam after the ash theft incident, the Scheduled Castes in the community boycotted the established goddess festival and set up their own, independent event. By removing themselves from the peripheries of the dominant castes' ceremonial activities, the Scheduled Caste community refused to participate in events that reproduced their social marginalization and exclusion.

The worship of chaotic, peripheral, fierce gods can also revalue and reposition people within the village community. Mines shows how festivals for fierce gods provide symbolic discourses with transformative power to subvert existing power structures. She relates the "same" story from multiple caste perspectives to illustrate how historical narratives, memories, and origin myths frame temple activities and claim relationships between individuals, families, castes, and particular gods. In addition, the routes of religious processions can appropriate space to...