Cubic Meter Meter itibaren Ivanallur, Tamil Nadu 609811, Indija itibaren Ivanallur, Tamil Nadu 609811, Indija

Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. By Margaret Trawick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Pp sxxi+299, 36 plates. $24.95. In this person-centered ethnography, Margaret Trawick weaves together an exegesis of an ancient Tamil poem and her fieldwork notes detailing her stay with a rural Tamil family in 1980 to help readers “get” how love [anpu] is conceptualized and expresses itself between brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, etc. According to Trawick, previous ethnographers had generated distorted understandings of Tamil family and culture through the idealist essentialisms of the structuralist (Lévi-Strauss by way of Louis Dumont) and culturalist (Kenneth David and Stephen Barnett) schools. Her monograph attempts to correct for such ‘mistakes’ by rendering the ethnographer’s relationship to her subjects and her theoretical framework transparent. The reader then understands the dynamics of anpu in the family’s own terms as something not only idealized but also lived. First, Trawick highlights those anecdotes focusing upon anpu’s expression which are originally baffling for the Western ethnographer (and her readers) – a mother’s cruel provocation of her two-year old to tears, for instance (77). Then, by unpacking her informants’ understandings of the ideal forms and expressions of anpu, Trawick renders ‘legible’ those baffling anecdotes of a suddenly less alien culture: a mother’s love expressed through cruelty could be viewed as sowing the seeds for the child’s future happiness (104).

Of course I really liked it. I just love John Grisham novels. The ending of this one could have had some more interesting twists than it did.