LEADER 02722nam 22004573a 450 001 9910976786203321 005 20250123130411.0 010 $a9780520301665 010 $a0520301668 010 $a9780520972230 010 $a0520972236 024 8 $a10.1525/luminos.72 035 $a(CKB)37386471100041 035 $a(ScCtBLL)e8c0cf19-1a68-42e4-b652-8a618b467c3f 035 $a(Perlego)2329464 035 $a(EXLCZ)9937386471100041 100 $a20250123i20192020 uu 101 0 $aeng 135 $aur||||||||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 00$aImpersonations$fHarshita Mruthinti Kamath 210 1$aOakland :$cUniversity of California Press,$d2019. 215 $a1 online resource (1 p.) 330 $aDrawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don stri?-ve?s?am (woman's guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. According to the hagiography of Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi dance, every brahmin man from a hereditary Kuchipudi family must don stri?-ve?s?am at least once in his life, a prescription that still resonates in the village today. Impersonation, the term used to indicate the donning of gender guise (ve?s?am), is not simply a performative mandate for Kuchipudi brahmin men but also a practice of power that creates normative ideals of brahmin masculinity in village performance and everyday life. However, the construction of brahmin masculinity against the backdrop of impersonation is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian "classical" dance tradition. By shifting from village to urban and transnational spaces, the book traces the technologies of normativity that create, sustain, and undermine normative ideals of gender, caste, and sexuality through the embodied practice of impersonation in contemporary South India. 606 $aSocial Science / Anthropology$2bisacsh 606 $aReligion / Antiquities & Archaeology$2bisacsh 606 $aHistory / Asia$2bisacsh 606 $aReligion 615 7$aSocial Science / Anthropology 615 7$aReligion / Antiquities & Archaeology 615 7$aHistory / Asia 615 0$aReligion. 700 $aMruthinti Kamath$b Harshita$01788002 801 0$bScCtBLL 801 1$bScCtBLL 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910976786203321 996 $aImpersonations$94322163 997 $aUNINA