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Dissertation Information for Usha Menon

NAME:
- Usha Menon

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Human Development

SCHOOL:
- University of Chicago (USA) (1995)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Receiving and giving: Distributivity as the source of women's wellbeing

Abstract: This dissertation explores the various criteria that Hindu women living in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Orissa, eastern India, consider essential for achieving wellbeing. It uses native exegeses and indigenous concepts to understand and appreciate these criteria. It suggests that for these women who live in extended households in a fairly orthodox Hindu community, wellbeing results from occupying particular family roles, those that are characterized by a vigorous distributivity. Within the Oriya Hindu extended household, such roles are those of senior wife and married husband's mother. In these roles, a woman is continually and substantially receiving from and giving to those above and below, within the family and outside. As the distributive center of all household activities when she ensures the family wellbeing, her own wellbeing peaks; when she moves out of these family roles, becomes less critically involved in the distributional nexus of the household, her wellbeing declines. Therefore, a woman's access to and achievement of wellbeing varies systematically across the life cycle.

This study also questions the ways in which Hindu women have often been represented in scholarly investigations. There has been a tendency, in such literature, to portray them as passive victims or subversive rebels. In radical contrast, the present study, using the words and actions of Oriya Hindu women, depicts them, neither as victim nor as rebel, but as active upholders of an alternate moral order, one which values self-control, service to others and duty to the family rather than liberty, equality and social justice.

MPACT Scores for Usha Menon

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-09-22 23:14:26

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