Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

by Margaret Trawick

Love, as a force in human affairs, is still not given much attention or credency by social scientists. With Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Margaret Trawick places the notion of love prominently in social scientific discourse. Her unforgettable and profusely illustrated study is a significant contribution to anthropology and to South Asian studies.

Trawick lived for a time in the midst of one large South Indian family and sought to understand the multiple and mutually shared expressions of anpu--what in English we call love. Often enveloping the author herself, changing her as she inevitably changed her hosts, this family performed before the young anthropologist's eyes the meaning of anpu: through poetry and conversation, through the not always gentle raising of children, through the weaving of kinship tapestries, through erotic exchanges among women, among men, and across the great sexual boundary. She communicates with grace and insight what she learned from this Tamil family, and we discover that love is no less universal than selfishness and individualism.

Genres: Anthropology, Ethnography, Nonfiction, College

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1989

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

[Ramya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outsider's intimate view as a social scientist with heart on the myriad ways "anpu" = love is manifested, negotiated, practiced, and dynamically formulated as necessary in mostly a high caste non-Brahmin family and intellectually from. Brahmin's perspective all the while inter- weaving her own young family's development during her research years.

[Akhil Kang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This particular work of Trawick's is often relegated outside the study of caste (as if kinship is not caste?) - I think is a fascinating insight into upper caste psyche, through notions of love. Can't recommend enough!

[Housing First Europe Hub · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended by Anand Pandian.

[Kate Gillogly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read this book several times, as I assign it to an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class. It is an excellent study of the dynamics of family life within the context of their cosmology. It is weak is issues of economy and political structure, and history. But as a nuanced, in-depth study of emotion and roles and relationships it is exquisitely fascinating. In reading it, my students (those who read closely, at least) get as close to immersion as is possible. Well-written and mostly accessible; the sections on kinship theory and psychoanalysis are dense, but not essential to understanding the Tamil family. It is a very good example of a humanistic study grounded in emic analysis. I use this book alongside more environmental/economic focused ethnographies in order to illustrate the different ways that anthropologists seek to understand people of other cultures.

[Soni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in college for a class on the "Studies of Southeast Asia" and found it very interesting as it is a part of India I am not familiar with, but my professor was and helped me understand the culture a bit more/

[Kevin Karpiak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not enough people have read this book. Even fewer have fallen in love with it. That's because not many people aren't idiots.

[Sandra Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and interesting.

[Vinoth · Rating 2 out of 5]

amazing