The Hijras of India are a religious community of ascribed intersexuals who worship Bahuchara Mata, the Mother Goddess, and share the experienced gender identity of women. Culturally defined as neither men nor women, the role of the hijras is based on sexual impotence and functions as a third gender. Although marginalized, the hijras have found a positive alternative within the Hindu belief system that sanctions their impotence and associates it with the powers of the religious ascetic. “In Indian reality, the impotent man is seen as ‘useless, an empty vessel, and fit for nothing’ because he is unable to procreate. But in Hindu mythology, impotence can be transformed into the power of generativity through the ideal of tapasya, the practice of asceticism (p. 29).” Despite the common belief that the hijras are born hermaphrodites, most are males that have voluntarily joined the community through an emasculation ritual. Only by an emasculation operation can one be “free from the curse of impotence and reborn as a hijra, who can call on the Mata and act as a vehicle of her power (p.29).” It is the Hindu religious concept of nirvan, or rebirth, which accepts that an impotent man can potentially become a powerful person. However, it is the traditional social and economic organization of India’s caste system that facilitates the hijras’ lifestyles as ritual performers and, ironically, as homosexual prostitutes.

In Hindu mythology, ritual, and art, androgynous figures are frequent and significant themes. “Hinduism in general holds that all persons contain within themselves both male and female principles. In the Tantric school of Hinduism, the Supreme Being is conceptualized as one complete sex containing male and female sexual organs. Hermaphroditism is the ideal. In some of these sects, male (never female) transvestism is used as a way of transcending one’s own sex, a prerequisite to achieving salvation (p. 21).” The hijras’ spiritual power comes from their identification with two Hindu gods that are also sexually ambiguous: Buhuchara Mata and Shiva. Bahuchara Mata, the Mother Goddess, cut her breasts off when attacked by an enemy. Shiva is believed to have castrated himself and then, throwing his linga into the world, spread his sexual power to the universe. “His act results in the fertility cult of linga worship, which expresses the paradoxical theme of creative asceticism (p. 30).” Whereas the ritual sacrifice of the phallus associated with Shiva is at the deeper level of the hijras claim to power, it is at the more conscious and culturally elaborated level of devotion to the Mother Goddess that is the center of the hijras community and the focus for their source of powers. These mythical figures help maintain a meaningful place for the hijras as an institutionalized third gender.

The hijras not only identify with the Mother Goddess and Shiva through their ambiguous sexual natures but are actually believed to embody their powers of generativity and procreativity. Hindu society incorporates the hijras as “a measure of power and requires (or at least accepts) their presence on auspicious occasions (p. 6).” The hijras appear at weddings and at the births of sons to bless the family with luck and fertility in exchange for gifts and money. The emasculation operation allows the hijras to identify with the Mata and Shiva, and legitimates their claim to power and their right to perform at ritual ceremonies. “Emasculation is the major source of the ritual power of the hijras. It is the source of their uniqueness and the most authentic way of identifying oneself as a hijra and of being so identified by the larger society…. It is only after the emasculation operation that hijras become vehicles of the Mother Goddess’s power (p. 25).” Illegal and life-threatening, the emasculation operation serves as a rite of passage from one’s old life to a new life, from one’s old gender to a new gender. Outlawed in 1888 by the British raja, the emasculation operation continues to be the dharm, or religious obligation, of the hijras and is at the heart of the definition of the hijras social identity. It is the only way to be accepted as a real hijra by Indian society and especially within the hijras community.

Although ritual performance is the most respectable and prestigious way to earn a living within the hijras community and is the major source of the hijras’ claim to respect from the larger society, homosexual prostitution is significantly more profitable. Most hijras are reluctant to admit that they engage in prostitution as it is contrary to the hijras ideal of ascetism and goes against the wishes of the Mother Goddess, who is celibate herself. “That hijras, at least in modern historical times, engage in widespread homosexual activity, undermines their respect in society but does not negate their ritual function. Hijras are well aware that they have only a tenuous hold on legitimacy in Indian society and that this hold is compromised by even covertly engaging in sexual relations and practicing prostitution (p. 11).” The hijras leaders know, despite common homosexual desires and behaviors within the community, that it is necessary to renounce all sexual activity in order to maintain the respect for themselves as sannyasis, or “other-worldly” ascetics and religious mendicants. Although stigmatized as sexually deviant by Indian society, the demand for hijras prostitutes seems to ensure them a living. In fact, homosexual prostitution is central to the maintenance of the hijras community as a major source of income.

The hijras community has become a magnet for attracting homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs who want to escape from India’s binary gender system. The hijras represent a third gender that has been rejected and even outlawed by Indian society for millennia. Deeply rooted in Indian culture, alternative genders can be traced back two-thousand years. “Homosexuality was condemned in the ancient lawbooks. The Laws of Manu, the first formulation of the Hindu moral code, held that men who engaged in anal sex lost their caste. Other medieval writers held that men who engaged in oral sex with other men were reborn impotent. But homosexuals were apparently tolerated in reality (p. 22).” While their generative powers are seen as other-worldly, their sexual ambiguity is seen as impotence, and represents a loss of virility to Indian society. They are feared and marginalized because their impotence is believed to be contagious. It is a “taboo of orthodox Hindus that the hijras should not touch, or even see, a new bride, so that their impotence will not contaminate her reproductive potential (p. 6).”

The hijras are also feared for their power to curse one’s family with misfortune and infertility. Many who are afraid of or disgusted by the hijras do not want them to perform at their ritual ceremonies. Yet, Indian culture continues to incorporate them by rewarding their behavior with gifts and money. The hijras have demanded the right to perform by threatening to curse those that deny it to them. Even the Indian police will not detain a hijra for ritual performance in fear that she will curse him. As Nanda illustrates, the police “refused to do anything and the woman finally had to meet the hijras’ demands in order to get them to leave (p. 7).” If the demands of the hijras are not met, they can potentially expose their mutilated genitals—the act most feared by the public. The role of the hijras to bless at ritual ceremonies has created a religious niche in Indian society that gives them some agency and status. The important cultural role the hijras play as ritual performers gives them social and economic mobility within the strict hierarchy of India’s caste system.

Although Indian society’s attitudes towards the hijras vary from respect, admiration, fear, irritation, disgust, and hatred, the hijras community has provided an optimistic outlet for “gender misfits” that transcends the dominant dichotomy of sex and gender that persists in India and explores an alternative path to personhood. In the Hindu tradition, the concept of the person is linked to participation in relations of caste and kinship, two of the most significant themes in Indian life. Full personhood is built on the heterosexual marriage with expectations of fertile sexuality. Thus, in the Indian Hindu tradition, impotent men and women are disqualified from achieving full personhood. However, they may find validation in the Indian spiritual concept of dharm, meaning moral duty or right action, which recognizes that many different paths may be taken to achieve full personhood. “The concept of dharm leads to creating a place for an enormous diversity of occupations, behaviors, and personal styles as long as these are seen as the working out of a life path; this is particularly so when the behavior is sanctified by tradition, formalized in ritual, and practiced with a group (p. 147).” For many who are betwixt and between, the role of the ascetic is available to achieve full personhood and fulfill their dharma, or religious obligation. The hijras identify with the ascetic through an emasculation operation, and in turn, transform an incomplete personhood into a complete one.

The hijras are people who are neither men nor women, but conceptualized as special, sacred beings, through ritual transformation. With roots in ancient India, the hijras “stand out as a well-defined, culturally and socially acknowledged, organizationally set apart, ritually specialized, historically continuous, sex/gender variation (p. 144).” Indian society and Hindu mythology provide some positive, or at least conciliatory, roles for such sexually ambiguous figures, allowing them to become powerful symbols of generativity and the divine. “It is this characteristically Indian ability to tolerate, even embrace, contradictions and variation at the social, cultural, and personality levels that provides the context in which the hijras cannot only be accommodated, but even granted a measure of power (p. 23).” The Hijras of India show that there is a great amount of flexibility in Hindu gender ideology for the admittance of gender overlap, gender transformations, and alternative genders in myth, ritual, and human experience.

Nanda, Serena.
1998. Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

~Sophia Kunen

Argue either for or against the statement that Language is Culture and Culture is Language. Use specific theories, names, and empirical examples to make your argument clear.

The statement that “Language is Culture and Culture is Language” implies that there is a complex homologous relationship between language and culture. Franz Boas argued that one could not really understand another culture without having direct access to its language because of the intimate connection between culture and language. Language is so complexly intertwined with culture that language and culture must have evolved together, influencing one another in the process and ultimately shaping what it means to be human. According to A.L. Kroeber (1923), “Culture, then, began when speech was present; and from then on, the enrichment of either means the further development of the other.”

Language is a tool for doing things in the world, for reproducing as much as changing reality. From a Vygotskian perspective, language is the most important tool because it has both semiotic and communicative characteristics. If culture is a product of human interaction, then cultural manifestations are acts of communication that assume and build particular speech communities. “The totality of the messages we exchange with one another while speaking a given language constitutes a speech community, that is, the whole society understood from the point of view of speaking (Rossi-Landi 1973:83, Duranti’s translation).” Children learn language as members of a speech community, which lays down “rules” for appropriate use of language (p. 198). As children learn a language, they also learn their culture and develop their cognitive abilities.

It is not just culture that communicates through language, but also language that communicates through cultures. Michael Silverstein proposed that the communicative force of culture works not only in representing aspects of reality, but also in connecting one context with another. The concept of the indexical meaning of signs postulates that “communication is not only the use of symbols that ’stand for’ beliefs, feelings, identities, events, it is also a way of pointing to, presupposing or bringing into the present context beliefs, feelings, identities, events (p. 37).”

According to the linguistic relativity principle, the way in which we think about the world is directly influenced by the language we use to talk about it. As Edward Sapir (1929) put it, “…the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis emphasizes the inextricable relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

Language exists in the context of cultural practices which, in turn, depend on the linguistic practices necessary for competent participation in a community. Therefore, to speak is to assume a culture, and to know a culture is to know a language. Culture is as much a product of language as language is a product of culture. Language and culture are thus homologous mental realities. Cultural products are representations and interpretations of the world that must be communicated in order to be lived. “Control of linguistic means often translates into control over our relationship with the world just as the acceptance of linguistic forms and the rules for their use forces us to accept and reproduce particular ways of being in the world (p. 49).” Culture cannot exist without language and language cannot exist without culture.

Reference:
Duranti, Alessandro.
1997 Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

~Sophia Kunen

“It’s a wonderful day for anthropology!”

Every anthropology student at LSU knows these immortal opening words of Dr. Bob Tague, unquestionably one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had and the inspiration for the title of this blog.

Hi, my name is Sophia Kunen. A New Orleans native and the youngest of three, I was born on April 27^th, 1987 to a graphic design artist and a psychologist. I graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in 2005, just months before Hurricane Katrina and poorly engineered levees brought 9 feet of water into my family’s home.  I am now a senior at Louisiana State University majoring in Anthropology.

Originally interested in Psychology and Sociology, I finally found my calling in the holistic field of Anthropology.  Although I haven’t declared a concentration, I anticipate this blog will be a helpful resource. I hope to explore Archaeological, Biological, Cultural, and Linguistic Anthropology to the fullest extent and learn from others who share my passion for the field.