Being a Widow and Other Life Stories: The Interplay between Lives and Words

SARAH LAMB

Department of Anthropology Brandeis University MS 006 Waltham, MA 02454-9110 SUMMARY This article looks at life stories, not just as tales about the past but as creative acts ofself-making and culture making. It explores life stories told by older women in West Bengal, India, focusing on one told by a childless widow. Previous scholars have made the important distinction between life as represented (through telling a story) and life as (actually) lived and experienced. This article suggests a somewhat different track: telling a life storylike other forms of talk or communicationis part of life as lived because, of course, it is lived and experienced, at least during the moments of telling.

The stories of widows and older women in West Bengal are not only interesting for what they reveal about women's lives in India, but they become the means to contemplate the interplay between lives and words, the processes by which women construct and represent their lives through telling a life story, and the significance of their telling. Over the past several decades, life stories have come under intense critical scrutiny in anthropology and in cultural, literary, and feminist studies.1 In trying to make sense of life story narrativeswhat they mean and do, why they are valuable as a form of ethnographic datascholars have grappled with the complex relationship between life and words, between life as lived and life as told. A life story cannot be taken to be a direct, objective account of actual events that happened in the past: we cannot assume there is a transparent reality external to the story that the story simply mirrors. Thus, several scholars have stressed that we must keep in mind the important distinction between life as represented (through a story) and life as (actually) lived and experienced (e.g.,Bruner 1988:7-8; Crapanzano 1984; Wikan 1995,1996). Edward Bruner elaborates, for instance: "There may be a correspondence between a life as lived, a life as experienced, and a life as told, but the anthropologist should never assume the correspondence nor fail to make the distinction" (1988:7). I wish to suggest a somewhat different track here. I argue that telling a life story, 'like other forms of talk or communication,' is part of life as lived, for it is lived and experienced, at least during the moments of telling. Even if there is no simple, direct relationship between life as lived in the past and life as told, the very act of telling a life story is itself an experiencenow, during the instances of telling. I will develop this perspective by exploring the life stories I gathered, mostly in 1989 and 1990. These were given by women of a village in West Bengal, by residents of a Calcutta old age home, and by residents of a widows' shelter in a Bengali pilgrimage town. I use the phrase life story rather than life history because story conveys a sense of the creative telling of a life, whereas history often implies a verifiable recounting of information about the past. To stress, as I do in this article, that life story narratives are creative social acts and life experiences does not mean, however, that another scholar could not meaningfully investigate a narrative's complex relationship to a historical past.
Anthropology and Humanism 26(l):16-34. Copyright 2001, American Anthropological Association.

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Kayera Bou's Story: Being a Childless Widow I will begin with the life story of Kayera Bou. Kayera Bou, or the "wife/daughter-in-law from Kayera,"2 was in about her late fifties or early sixties when I first met her. She wore her thin gray-black hair pulled back in a tight knot and, as clothing, the plain white widows' saris prescribed for upper-caste widows in the region. She was childless and had been widowed as a younger woman, and she was a Brahman. She thus had to endure the rigorous restrictions prescribed for Brahman widows in West Bengal.3 Along with having to wear white, she could not remarry, she ate a strict vegetarian diet and rice only once a day, and she had given up most forms of jewelry and adornment. Even after her husband's death she had continued to live in her marital home, where she maintained her own cooking and sleeping quarters. The family was fairly well off (with several acres of land and a general store to its name), and so Kayera Bou was provided for; but she felt she had suffered severely and unjustly in her life as a widow. As has often occurred in other relationships between an anthropologist and the subject of a life story narrative (e.g., Behar 1993:6; Hill 1990:29-30), Kayera Bou sought me out; I did not initially seek her out. She called to me one day as I was walking by, took me aside into her own private room, closed the door, and asked me to come back during siesta time when it was more private so that she could tell me her story. She wanted to tell me about the suffering of widows in Bengali society. I recorded her story that afternoon. Looking back now, I realize how much my questions inevitably shaped the framing of her and others' stories into what a U.S. audience would recognize as a "life history" genre, beginning with the individual's childhood and moving chronologically through the life course.4 Women also spontaneously (that is, without my prompting) told stories to and with each other a lot, about their own and other people's lives. The phrase they use, which we might translate as conversation or gossip, literally means "to make (or tell) stories" (galpa kara). But as for a chronological presentation of a whole life from birth to death, I only encountered one when I elicited it. After turning on my tape recorder with Kayera Bou, for instance, I began by asking, "Tell me the story of your life [jibaner galpa]. What happened to you all your life since childhood?" In Kayera Bou's case, though, after I opened with that question, I hardly had to ask any more. She told me her story in a flood of words, with eloquence, vividness, bitterness, pathos. Her performance had a very compelling quality. I wish I could repeat the whole story here, but of course I cannot. I will summarize some its key elements before moving on to my analysis.
Her Story

"Well, in my childhood, I mean, when I was in my father's house, then I was very happy." Kayera Bou began her life narrative with these words, describing her childhood as the happiest years of her life, when she was loved, surrounded by kin, fed by her mother, and encouraged to study and to learn to read and write in school. But childhood did not last long. After Kayera Bou (or Aparna, as she was called in girlhood) passed her fourth grade exam, her teachers and parents declared that she would no longer study. She was already thirteen. It was time to give her in marriage. Within a few years, during what she refers to as still the "beginnings of [her] life" (pratham jibane), her father arranged her marriage, and she left her natal home of Kayera to come to Mangaldihi, some 20 kilometers away. Kayera Bou then related at length the difficult years of her married life and her frustrated quest to have childrenboth of which are central to her later representation of her life as a widow. For the first eight months of marriage she recalled

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experiencing "a little, a little happiness." Her husband would come to sleep with her at night. There was some affection, some of what husbands and wives do. But just eight months after her wedding, everything suddenly changed when her husband's younger brother died of meningitis at the age of 18. Kayera Bou went to the hospital to nurse him for three days, and while she was putting ice on his forehead, he died. Her husband and his parents blamed her for the death, calling her ill-omened and inauspicious (apaya),5 and they threatened to send her back to her parents. She recalled:
My husband's head went bad. He'd say, "You came, and my brother died." He wouldn't come near me. Even if I lay next to him in bed, he wouldn't say anything to me. And I'm a woman. I couldn't touch him first. What if I touched him and he reproached me? But I didn't tell anyone about it. I was embarrassed. And what would telling accomplish? But many people would ask me about it; they'd say, "Doesn't he talk to you? [i.e., have sexual relations with you?]" But I wouldn't answer. I'd just cry.

About five years passed like this. Then Kayera Bou told how finally, by the time he had a little mind to love her, she was the one who became sick. She was afflicted with sucibai rog, a mania for cleanliness and purity, an aversion to touching or mixing with other people and things, a need to wash constantly.6 "So," Kayera Bou narrated, "even if he called me to him, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't touch him. And I got angry at him, 'You judged me unfairly. I didn't do anything wrong. I came and your brother died. What could I do? It's fate [bhagya].' " Then, to make their chances for marital closeness and producing children even worse, her husband became afflicted with a disease that she described as some kind of growth or scarring in "that place," his sexual organs, and he left for six months to have an operation in Calcutta. Later, he had Kayera Bou undergo an operation as well, in case there was a fault in her womb. Her mother and father wished desperately for her to have children. Her mother would implore, "Can't we cut her stomach and put a child into it? My daughter will have a samsar [a family, a household]." But as Kayera Bou reached 30 and "the time for having children passed," her husband became sick and bedridden with diabetes. Here she went to great pains in her narrative to constructfor herself, for me, and for her later psychiatristthis one period of their relationship as a close, loving one, the period, as she put it, when "the deep love between a husband and wife" was finally realized. Although there could be no more romantic or sexual love (prem-bhab) between them, she would sit by his bed daily. He would ask her to dress up, to paint red alta on her feet,7 to let his mother do the work so that she could stay by his side. However, Kayera Bou's "head had gradually gone bad" over this period, from the stress of not having children and of being unable to have any kind of sexual relationship with her husband. Her parents and husband persuaded her to go to a mental health sanitarium in Ranchi, Bihar, for "a rest." She wept as she left, doing respectful gestures (pranam) to her husband over and over again.8 That was the last time she saw him. At Ranchi, she began a therapy of shock treatment and psychiatric counseling. Her husband died after she had been there for only 14 days. Her doctor and parents kept the news from her at first, though, fearing her instability. Finally, after two months, her father and brother came to get her. She recalled with vivid detail how she dressed herself for the journey in married woman's garb, with red vermilion in her hair,9 her married woman's bracelets, red alta on her feet, feeling that she had become so attractive, with a fair complexion, overflowing with eagerness to see her husband again.

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Then, after she arrived at her parents' home, it gradually dawned on her what had happened. Her mother was sobbing. Their family's widowed maidservant came to take her to the water to perform the ritual of becoming a widow, where she had to break her married woman's bangles, wash off her vermilion and alta, remove her beautiful, colored sari, and don the permanent white of the widow. She told:
When I understood what was happening, I began to sob. I beat my head and cried all night long. I had to be taken to the water, take off all those things and throw them away and be bathed. Then where was the alta? And where were the ornaments? And good clothes? Where was anything? One after another they were all sunk in the water. Everything became surrounded with gloom. When he left everything became gloom. Sadness.... I was weeping and shouting. I wailed over and over again, "I'll see him one more time! One more time! Why don't you show him to me again?" I sobbed and sobbed thinking of all the hope I had come from Ranchi with, thinking I would see him again.

The remainder of her narrative focuses on her life as a widow. Her father wanted her to return to her natal home, as do many upper-caste childless widows in this region. But her mother said, "No, I'm going to place her over there. It's the place of her husband." Kayera Bou's mother-in-law also said, "Bring my bou [daughter-in-law] here. I won't be able to live without my bou." So she remained in her marital home, where the only ones left were her mother-in-law, herself, and her husband's sister's son, who had been brought in to look after and inherit the family property and to be the male of the household, as there were no descendants in her husband's family line. She narrated with detail the suffering of her life there as a widow: "Muri [dry, puffed rice] at night, and vegetarian rice in the day. How many kinds of pain do we suffer if our husband doesn't live in our house?! Just one pain? Pain in all directions! Burning agony! Clothes, food, mixing with others, laughter.... Everything's forbidden." She told how she was guarded by her husband's kin, who prevented her from even looking at another man, treating her as a dangerous slut (randi, or "widow-prostitute"),10 reproaching her, saying, "None of that will happen in our house. You've come to our house. You won't talk to any man." She told of how she could not wear colored saris or petticoats, jewelry, or even a little powder on her face, without being reproached by her husband's kin and teased by the neighborhood girls; how she had to eat an austere dietas a means of controlling her sexuality and to uphold the moral-religious order, dharma; how she felt herself to be utterly alone in the world of kin, how she cooked her food and ate alone (because of her special widow's diet) and had no one really to love her or care for her. Throughout, she frequently criticized "Bengalis" and "Bengali society" for all this, the special plight of Brahman widows. She strived also to remove herself from blamealthough her community often blamed her, other widows, and other young brides for the calamities that happened in their households. She would say, "What did / do that was wrong?!" "I didn't do anything unjust!" She ended by stating, "I received everything in this life, but not peace. Ever since I came to my husband's house after marriage all this began to happenone thing after another. What caused it all to happen?" Then she blessed me by hoping for me that / would have children, that all my wishes would be fulfilled, and that she would be able to know about my fulfillment.

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Now for my analysis. Why am I interested in this life story? Why do I report it here? Life stories are immediately, viscerally, interesting and compelling, of course; and this is one reason they are popular, especially in a humanistic anthropology. But why else, if at all, are they valuable for us as anthropologists? There will be several parts to my response. First, life stories are interesting and valuable in themselves because they constitute a unique kind of encapsulated performance by which an actor is involved in the meaningful creation of a life world.11 The teller of a life story takes something of the substance and experiences of his or her own immediate and past life and fashions this into a meaningful story; in doing so she or he is also involved in the working out and making senseoften the critiquingof the broader social and cultural systems (here, such as gender, caste, and marriage) that impinge on and shape that life. Ruth Behar has made similar points, drawing on some of Sherry Ortner's arguments in her "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties"(1984): a life history should allow one to investigate not only how history and culture "happen" to people but how an actor makes culturally meaningful history (Behar 1995:149-150). Similarly I look at storytellinglike other forms of communicationas a mode of social action, a creative act of self making and culture making, through the telling of words.12 In this vein, there are several main dimensions of Kayera Bou's story making, self making, and culture making that I would like to highlight here. Kayera Bou's overt purpose in telling her story was to comment on the condition of widows in her society and to critique what she termed "Bengali society" for producing these conditions. Why tell me? I was interested; there was no one else to tell; and there was no other storytelling tradition in her locality that allowed for critical commentary on widowhood. Although women in South Asia commonly tell stories surrounding other dimensions of women's lives, as sisters, wives, and daughters-in-law (see, e.g., Raheja and Gold 1994), stories revolving around the widow as subject are comparatively rare. This is perhaps because widowsin particular, those widowed while young and childlessare often ostracized, regarded as inauspicious and disturbing, as they are without a husband or children to give their lives meaning, purpose, and sociality, and they are implicitly blamed for their husbands' deaths (see Lamb 2000:213-238). It is interesting (some might think limiting) that she told this story to me in private. One way to assess a narrative as a form of social action or performance is to scrutinize its pragmatic effect. John Austin, in How to Do Things with Words, calls utterances "performatives" when, instead of being descriptive or reportive (referential), the saying of the utterance constitutes the doing of an action, such as when one utters "I do" in the course of a marriage ceremony (and is thereby married) or "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth" in a christening ceremony (and thereby names the ship) (1962:5-6). In Kayera Bou's case, however, it is not clear that her narrative can have such a pragmatic, external effect. Is her self-making narrative not utterly doomed to fail, in local perceptions, as an effective contestation of gossip and slander about her widowhood, if she and I are the only audiences? Unni Wikan, in scrutinizing the significance of life narratives along the back streets of Cairo, remarks on the resistance that life puts up against one's narrative efforts to think and speak well of oneself (1995:276, 1996:286). The constraints of widowhood in West Bengal are powerful. I would not want, however, to limit our assessment of the force, resonance, or reality of a narrative as a social act or experience in terms only of its external (or future) pragmatic outcomes. We must also scrutinize the act of storytelling

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itselfwhat it does, what it means, what its import is for the narrator and the listener during the moments of telling. Self-narrating can be experienced as a powerful, expressive act, a means of reflecting on the circumstances of one's life and of creating realitiesparticularly conceptual and affective ones. For the listener, a narrative serves thus also as a window into the intentionality and creative agency of the teller. Michael Jackson writes of Kuranko storytelling, "Kuranko social life is full of dilemmas and tensions. It is often impossible to deal with these quandaries by changing external circumstances. But through stories these vexed issues are voiced, discussed, and reconfigured" (1996:21; see also 1982). He comments further that "it is difficult to capture the kinds of transformed awareness that storytelling . . . effects"; nonetheless, "it is important to stress that human intentionality, consciousness, and coping do not always find expression in the 'practical functions' of language" (1996:21). Regardless of whether her story can produce future, pragmatic outcomes (for instance, change the ways others perceive her) or report accurate "information" about her past, Kayera Bou's storytelling itself was an act of creative refashioning of her self and world, as through it she made herselfat least for those moments of tellinginto a woman other than that represented to her via her dominant society. One of Kayera Bou's main aims here was to assert that she was not to blame for her widowhood, her childlessness, or her husband's brother's death; that she was not a "slut" (randi); that there would have been no danger if she had talked or even laughed with other men; that she could legitimately wear (as she did occasionally) a pair of bright, spring-green earrings, a deeply colored black petticoat under her white sari, or some powder on her face. "Let them say what they will. They can't reproach me!" she asserted. "I didn't do anything unjust!" "We're still human after all!" she said of widows, with bitter irony. "After our husbands die, are we no longer human?" At the same time, Kayera Bou also produced herself in her narrative as a "traditional" devoted wife and widow. In striving to construct her life in a way that can give it some sense or value, she seems to have felt the need to present her marriage ultimately as a meaningful one, for her identity as a wife is one of the few identities available to her, given the limits of her caste, gender, and village locale and the fact that she bore no children to make her a mother. Most of the highest caste (Brahman and Kayastha) women in West Bengal may only marry once.13 Once married, they are no longer fully daughters. No longer will their parents and natal kin call them "their own folk" (nijer lok). Further, few high-caste rural widows can find work out of the home, for the only jobs considered acceptable for their caste and gender (such as teaching or nursing) require a degree of education that only some women are able to attain. So, if she has neither children, nor a husband, nor work, who/what can she be? Kayera Bou took pains, then, to present at least a part of her life experience as that of a true wife, when she shared love and intimacy with her husband. She connected herself to me as another married woman by saying, "When you didn't get any letters from your husband for a long time, I can understand how awful you must have felt. A husband is such a thing." She described in detail the time when she felt closest to her husband, when he was bedridden with diabetes and she would sit by his side, dressed in attractive clothes, with the red alta of an auspicious wife painted on her feet, talking with him, feeding him, and helping him sit up and lie down. She related how she strove at Ranchi to convince her psychiatrist (as she seemed also to be persuading me and herself) that she really did have a true marital relationship with her husband, although by the end she admitted that the psychiatrist saw through her:

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The doctor would ask, "How is prem-bhab [romantic, sexual love] with your husband? Why aren't you having any children?" But I'd tell the doctor that the love between a husband and wife is inside. No one else can know about it. The deep love between a husband and wife can't be talked about. I sat by [my husband]. I remember the times we had together. Just like I'm sitting by you now as you tape me, I remember sitting with him. He couldn't go anywhere, but he'd tell me to dress up, and sit by him, and make sure I didn't take the alta off my feet. He'd say, "Let my mother do the work. Don't you do it. Stay by me." Love, love Iprem, bhalobasa]. My doctor would say, "I think you were never really able to mix with your husband, and that's why you have this illness." But I told the doctor, "Doctor-babu, the kind of mixing that happens between husbands and wives in a Bengali house also happened to u s . . . . At night what happens happens." But the doctor still understood, even though I tried to hide it from him. He said, "No, no, you didn't have that kind of love." Kayera Bou also used her representation of her enduring wifely devotion to

her husband as a means to explain why she felt compelled to observe the widow's restrictive code for conduct. She interwove with her more critical, resistatory statements comments such as, "My husband was my god [devata], and he still is, for as long as I live." The rigorous code for conduct prescribed for many high-caste North Indian widowsa "dry," "cool," vegetarian diet, frequent fasting, wearing white, foregoing adornments, avoiding the company of outside men, celibacyis presented most commonly by scholars as a means by which families and communities press widows to curb their unmatched, dangerous sexuality. Kayera Bou acknowledged in her narrative that others in her community forced such a perspective on her, but she contended that she observed the widow's code not because of any dangers or faults of her own but as a sign of her ongoing devotion to her husband and thus of her enduring wifely identity. By living markedly as a widow, she affirmed her former (or continuing?) identity as a wife, for a widow is defined in terms of her relationship with her husband, even though he is dead. Kayera Bou thus took on a strategy some other widows also doto make sense of widowhood and gain respect from others by constructing herself as a devoted, faithful, loving wife or pativrata, a woman focusing her life on devotion to her husband, be he alive or dead. So Kayera Bou was, ironically, constructing herself as a pativrata at the same time as she was critiquing her duty to be one. How we choose to talk about the past is connected to what we want to tell and work out in the present. The ways we talk about our pasts relate to what we want to make in the future. Narrative is part of life, not just in the present but even in the next moment.14 Kayera Bou told of how "I sobbed and sobbed thinking of all the hope I'd come with from Ranchi, thinking I'd see him [my husband] again." The narrated sadness and hope she felt in the past connects to the sadness and hope she was experiencing and working out now and for her future. Through narratively bringing alivefor me and for herselfher marital relationship with her husband, she aspired to keep him with her in some way, to give her life as a wife and widow some meaning. The impression gained from much of the scholarly literature on widowhood in India is that widows are either oppressed victims of "patriarchy" or compliant followers of Hindu "tradition." Uma Chakravarti, for instance, suggests that for Brahman widows in 18th-century Maharashtra, "resistance" to the customs prescribed for widows was "virtually impossible" (1995:14). Lata- Mani, scrutinizing colonial accounts of widow burning, laments the fact that we have no independent access to the mental or subjective states of these widows, outside of colonial representations of them as perennial victimsalthough she states that "it is fair to assume that the mental states of widows were complex and inconsistent"

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(1990:97). For receivers of Kayera Bou's tale, then, the story is especially valuable as a window into the complexity of this particular woman's self-perceptions and creative agency as she strove to make her life and identity coherent and bearable, partly by protesting, and partly by upholding, the conditions of her widowhood. In Kayera Bou's life story, then, we see an actor striving to make sense out of the circumstances of her life. She produces her self in terms of the existing social forms of gender, caste, and marriage that constrain her; but these are forms that she, as a particular actor, remakes in ways meaningful to her. Generalities: Ways of Being Widows and Single Women I am interested, however, not only in the window this and other life stories provide us for entering into a particular actor's processes of life and culture making but also in what this life story (and others like it) tells us about widowhood (and marriage and gender) in general. First, let me say that recently in anthropology there has been a fair amount of opposition to looking at the life story narrative as a vehicle for making generalizations about a broader social whole (such as "widowhood"), a whole that is external to the story and storytelling performance itself but which the story is presumed to reflect. Lila Abu-Lughod views the telling of stories,15 for instance, as a potentially powerful tool for "working against generalizations" (1993:13). Daphne Patai adds: "I see the individual life story as a document that is itself unique and highly valuable, one we must not too readily leap over in pursuit of the generalization" (1988b: 143). Ruth Behar writes similarly of wanting to see (or read) the subject of her life story, Esperanza, not as a (generalized) "type" (1995:153). However, I am interested in reading Kayera Bou's story partly as a means to make some generalizations and to use what she has given me through telling her story to explore her as a "type"a childless widow, a widow, a Brahman widow, a once-young widow, a member of what she referred to as her "Bengali society." Further, I believe that she also viewed and sought to view and construct herself, in part, in such a way. It is not only anthropologists who make generalizations, surely; people also generalize about themselves and the conditions of their own lives. Even if our aim is to better understand and represent particular people's lives, we cannot do so adequately without scrutinizing the very kinds of generalized, broader forces and categories through which people make these lives. So here I wish to compare briefly Kayera Bou's story to life stories of other widowed and single women. While doing research in West Bengal on other subjects (not focusing at the time on life storytelling per se),161 collected many women's and men's life stories. Most of the tellers did not seek me out in the same way that Kayera Bou did, and thus their stories were often not as resonant as performances. But many were richly compelling, and (whether elicited by me or not) most served not only to create a vision of the teller's own, particular life but also to invoke and comment on broader social-cultural categories. Some of the most interesting and revealingthose that challenged and offered enlightening perspectives on generalizations often made about women, widowhood, marriage, and motherhood in South Asiawere those told by widows and other single nonmarried women. These are what I will look at here: the stories of childless widows like Kayera Bou, of women widowed as mothers, and of never-married women. First, let me note that the literature on widowhood in India has tended to be rather monolithic, lumping widows into a broad, uniform category. Caste differences are often heeded, but only rarely are differences of age, life stage, or maternal status noted.17 Widowhood is presented as a shared, overpowering

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force of identity in a way that masks not only the complexity and ambiguity of particular widows' subjective states but also any variations in what widowhood can mean and entail, even as a generalized category. Out of all the widows from whom I elicited stories, it was only childless widows who narrated their identities primarily as widows. Kayera Bou's narration of her life was in significant respects not unlike those of other childless widows now grown into older women. Dominant themes in these widows' stories are those of being utterly alone in the world of kin; of having no valued purpose, or place, or identity; of grasping at a tenuous identity as a devoted wife; of being treated unjustly as a "slut"; and of the telling of their life stories as a means of making critical commentary on the social conditions of widowhood in Bengali society. Saiba Banerjee, a childless Brahman woman widowed at the age of 23, narrated her life story: "So by the end, wherever I went they'd say, 'There's no room for you here/ " The childless woman cried out for someone who could be her own. Saiba Banerjee tried at one point to care for her nephew, her sister's infant son, but she was turned away in favor of a hired nurse. Finally, as an elderly woman, she made her way to an old age home in Calcutta. Some childless widows presented their marriages, which made them immutably into widows, as almost a farce.18 One woman told how she was married when she was only seven, while, as she put it, "still drinking milk from my mother's breast," and then widowed at 14, just a few months after moving into her husband's home. "I can't even remember his face," she said with some sarcastic bitternesseven though her whole later life had to revolve around the social perception of her enduring connection to this man, her husband, who no longer lives. The themes in these childless widows' stories match those in much of the other work on widowhood in India, which has often concentrated on the liminality and anomalousness of widowsas women without a social placeand on the perceived dangers of a widow's sexuality and inauspiciousness.19 For women widowed at a young age without childrenof a caste and in a community that does not permit widow remarriagewidowhood becomes an all-encompassing, tragic force in their narrated identities and lives. But it was clear that only childless widows centered their life narratives around widowhood. For those widowed with children, motherhood was a much more salient theme. I should note that almost all of the life stories I collected from older women, widowed or not, begin with a period of carefree, happy childhood when they were fed and loved in their fathers' homes (baper bari). Those widowed as mothers, speaking of the next stage, present a brief account of their married life and their husbands' deaths; but they move on to concentrate on motherhood, its joys and travails. This narration of motherhood often begins with an account of the long, arduous period of raising young children alone, frequently as a single head of a household, living in or near poverty. The period is generally presented as a time of extreme difficulty and suffering, filled with labor, self-sacrifice, and worries about how to raise the children. Billo's Ma, a lower-caste Bagdi woman, was left widowed with eight young children, and her life story centered on her experiences and position as a mother.20 She narrated: "I brought up my children with great difficulty All my kids were still very young when their father died. Not one of them was old enough to work. So I had to bring them all up I used to tell him [my husband] before he died, 'You're going to die and how will we live?'" She told of how she sold all of her possessionsa small plot of land, a mud house, water jugs, plates, dishes, ankle bracelets, a waist band, three pairs of gold earrings, a necklace, and a silver pendantfirst to try to cure her husband's illness and then to feed her children: "But even with all this selling, nothing

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happened." They did not have a regular house to sleep in, just a broken corner of an old house where a few could crowd in at night, the others taking shelter in a neighbor's courtyard. She would work at whatever job she could findcooking for some, washing clothes for others, planting rice, making cow dung patties for fuel. "We didn't even have clothes to wear," she told me. "At that time one sari cost about six or ten rupees. I would buy one of those, cut it into two, and I would wear one part and my oldest daughter would wear the other. I would give my daughter the better part." Her story of how one neighbor helped look after them only highlighted her suffering:
Every day on his way to the office in the morning he would ask the kids, "What did you eat?" I would answer, "We had tea." He'd say, "You did have tea?" And I'd say, "Yes." He'd say, "Good."' And then on his way home every day he would ask if we had eaten rice. On the days that we had eaten, I'd say, "Yes, we ate." [Then she began to cry and continued through her tears.] And on the days we hadn't eaten, I would say, "No, we didn't eat today."

After narrating the extraordinarily difficult years of raising young children alone, Billo's Ma, like other widowed mothers, described moving on to a phase of more mature age, as matron or mother of married sons, a phase presented in terms not unlike those of older married women with children. For many, even if they suffered as young widowed mothers, mature motherhood brought rewards and comforts. Jaydeb's Ma narrated how she labored hard when her son was an infant and her husband diedworking in the fields, planting and harvesting rice, so that her son and she could eat. She struggled purposefully so that he would not suffer: "I'd say, 'I'm not going to have my son do any work. Whatever I can bring home from work, that's what my son and I will eat.' " After her son grew up and he began to work as a day laborer and then a share-cropper, however, "the days began to go easier." As she told it: "I worked very hard to eatwhen I became a widow. I ran this family with great difficulty, with immense sadness. Now I'm eating well. Now there's muri [puffed rice] and rice. Rice upon rice; puffed rice upon puffed rice. One year's molasses is lasting us ten years." She told with pride how no one called her by her name but instead used "Jaydeb's Ma" and the propitious story of how, through her son, her family finally expanded: "Just as my own child happened, five children of his have happenedthree girls and two boys. Now we're well off, with all these children." However, mature motherhood in many widowed mothers' self-narratives is often presented with much more ambivalence. The central theme of Billo's Ma's story emerges as the capriciousness and pain of motherhoodhow women as mothers pour out breast milk, love, material wealth, and exertion to raise their children all of their lives. But she added how in the end the sons never reciprocate what their mother has sacrificed to give them (see also Lamb 2000:74-78). Billo's Ma narrated, after describing her years of struggle to raise her children:
My sons all grew up, and I gave all their weddings. All of their own families have happened, and now whose am I? Now whose am I? I am no longer anyone. Now someone [one son] is saying, "I came from a hole in the ground." Another is saying, "I fell from the sky." Another is saying, "I came from God," and yet another is saying, "My hands and feet came on their own; I grew up on my own." Who am I now? I'm speaking the truth. What kind of thing is a mother?

Here, widowhood itself does not figure as a central theme or salient feature of a widowed mother's narrated identity. Rather, her narrative revolves mostly around motherhoodbeing a single parent to her children and how much her

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children do (or do not) now love and care for her in return for all she has done for them. Widowhood is significant in that it makes the woman a single mother, and raising children alone is often very difficult. But even her identity as a single mother fades as children grow up and she becomes a mother and mother-in-law of grown descendants. In the life stories of women who become widows when their children are already grown, widowhood is often barely mentioned. It becomes a small moment amid the other significant tales of precious natal days, marital household life, kids, grandkids, managing all these relationships, preparing for aging and dying, and the like. In fact, the life stories of matrons who become widows are not at all strikingly different from life story narratives I heard from older, still-married (nonwidowed) women with grown children. Motherhood tends to be represented in the literature on South Asian women as an unequivocally positive and valuable experience, one that brings women (who may be vulnerable in other ways as wives or daughters-in-law) immense security, pleasure, and fulfillment. Childless widows in their life stories similarly imagine motherhood as utterly wonderful: in Kayera Bou's tale, children would have assuaged all of her afflictions. With these perspectives in mind, I see two interesting insights that widowed mothers forge in their life narratives: (1) widowhood is not so important to themrather, motherhood is; and (2) motherhood is much more complex and ambivalent than we have been generally led to imagine. It is revealing, finally, to contrast the stories of childless widows with those of childless single women who never married. Neither have children or husbands. But for the never-married woman, her natal kin remain her "own" kin for life, so she does not become "with no one." This is a point especially highlighted in the life stories of childless widows, even more than in the narratives of never-married women, who seem to take these enduring natal relationships for granted. Childless widows yearningly imagine what it would have been like for them if they had never married: "It is better not to get married at all than to be a widow," one childless Brahman widow pondered in the courtyard of a shelter for destitute widows in which she lived. "If you never marry, then at least you have the people from your father's home If you're a widow with no children, then who will look after you? Who will feed you? You have no one.... If you're unmarried, you're just the same as you always were." Remarkable, further, is the fact that the few never-married older women from whom I elicited life stories defined themselves largely not through their ties (or lack of ties) to any kin (natal or marital) but through their careers, their work, mostly as teachers and nurses.21 Usha Sengupta, a striking, never-married woman I encountered in the Navanir old age home in Calcutta, opened her life story speaking of work and of her retirement, old age, and place in Navanir, not in terms of being abandoned, alone, and having no one (as did most of the women in Navanir who were either widows or mothers) but in terms of her current "work-less" (a-karma) condition. In her life story, she told of desiring to be a schoolteacher ever since she was a young child. "I never wanted to get married," she insisted. "When I was young, I used to like to dress up in my brothers' clothes, in boys' clothing, and go out." When her parents would bring a prospective groom's family to see her, she would run and hide. "I didn't want to live in anyone else's samsar [family, household]," she insisted. "I planned to work myself, to earn money myself, and to eat that way." She used to pray to God that she could be a schoolteacher and not do samsar (i.e., get married and live a family life). And her prayers were fulfilled: she came to Calcutta after her marriageable age had passed and taught there as a primary school teacher for 30 years until

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she retired to the old age home, supported by a small monthly pension. She told finally of having brothers and sisters; liking to sew, paint, and read; and then she closed: "I am comfortable here. That is all of my life. I have nothing more to say." The impression gained from the existing scholarly literature on women's lives in South Asia is that single women do not really existor at least not women who are single by choice. Susan Seymour writes, for instance, that in the North Indian town of Bhubaneswar, a young woman who has been bypassed in the marriage market "has a bleak life ahead of her" (1999:200), that "to be unmarried and childless is considered a tragedy for a woman" (1999:200), and that, "without exception, the young women whom I have watched come of age in Bhubaneswar have accepted marriage as both inevitable and desirable" (1999:213). Having listened to the unmarried woman Usha Sengupta and other older, never-married women at Navanir with similar preconceptions, I found myself being prone to interjectif-the subject of marriage (or lack of marriage) did not come up"Why didn't you get married?" I was struck later, in transcribing the tapes, how I had interrupted several women with this question, which seemed at times to irritate them, so I was just like others who had pestered them with this issue throughout their lives. I had at first supposed, consistent with more dominant scholarly and popular cultural representations, that a woman who did not marry probably failed to do so because of her family's lack of ability to produce a sufficient dowry, or because of what was considered her "dark" or unattractive appearance, or because of some stain on her reputation or the like. But Usha Sengupta's story, like those of several other older never-married women, suggests differently. It is of course possible that other obstacles to marriage (such as insufficient dowry) did occur in a "true" historical past. But the very act of claiming one's single state as an actively pursued choice creates alternative representations of what a woman can be and do. Here, narrative creates an alternative social reality, as it challenges dominant ways of envisioning women and marriage. Childless widows, widowed mothers, and single, never-married women each emphasize three distinct kinds of experiences in their life stories, through which each defines and creates her self: widowhood-cum-marriage, motherhood, and independence. For Kayera Bou, her being a "proper widow" was a way of being a married woman. In childless widows' narrated identities, marriage more than anything else is perhaps what is crucialthe relationship with a living or dead, close or distant, honored or fruitless, husband. The majority of Bengali widows are mothers, however, and these women do not generally narrate widowhood as a salient part of their identity. Widows who have children need not elaborate on their lives as widows or as wivesbecause they are mothers, an experience that provides immense social value, purpose, intimacy, loss, hope, struggle, pride, and anguish all on its own. The relatively few single women whose stories I heard told of seeking value, identity, and place not through either marriage or children but through work and "independence," through not living in or being dependent on any other person's householdthereby resisting the idea that marriage and household are the only possible meaningful identities for women. These widowed and single women's narratives counter several unworkable generalizations by conveying that the experience of widowhood is not monolithic (and being a widow is not even a primary feature of identity for those women widowed with children), that motherhood does not bring unequivocal joys, and that being single and never-married is not necessarily a tragedy or an accident. There are more possible ways for women to make meaningful lives than through marriage and motherhood. Here, life storiesperformed, listened to, and comparedwork against existing, dominant generalizations to help formulate new, more true and nuanced ones. All people, not only anthropologists, tell

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stories partly in order to make generalizations about the broader forces and conditions that shape and constrain their lives. Tellers of life stories do some of what ethnographers do, and more besides: they invoke and critique cultural categories, position themselves in relation to these categories, and rethink the social order. Ethnographers can scrutinize life narratives not only as they seek to understand an individual's dialogic acts of self and culture making but to refine generalized representations of the broader categoriessuch as widowhood and marriage, motherhood and genderwith and through which people make and remake their lives. Concluding Remarks One of my aims in this article has been to respond to the arguments that scholars of life histories have made separating life and the telling of life. Several recent scholars have seemed to dichotomize lived life and narrated life, insinuating that narrated life, the telling of stories, is not part of lived life. Edward Bruner, for instance, reflects: "Nevertheless, a life history is still a story, a representation of a life, not a life as lived or experienced" (1988:8). Vincent Crapanzano states: "When we analyze a life history, we are analyzing a text, not a social reality" (1984:959). Daphne Patai ruminates: "We are not, however, likely to see Marialice's story as itself an activity" (1988b:164). Unni Wikan adds: "I need, however, to distinguish self-experience and self-construction from self-representation and self-presentation It is by acting in and on the world, not by talking about it or oneself, that lives and selves are made" (1995:266; d. 1996:286).22 One of the main points expressed by these various scholars is a very important and valid one: the story that one tells about one's life cannot directly mirror the life that one has actually lived in the past. That is, a life story is not merely (or even primarily) referential in function, if what it is supposed to refer to are the events and experiences of the teller's past.23 But what has not been scrutinized adequately, I suggest, is how the very act of telling a life story is itself an experience, a practice, a part of lived life.24 In response to Patai, I ask why should we not see the telling of Marialice's story "as itself an activity"? After the event of its telling, the life history may indeed become, as Crapanzano states, a "text," removed in certain ways from "social reality." But the fabricating and eliciting of the life historythe interchange between the anthropologist and the informant/storyteller and the context of their interactionare themselves, surely, squarely a part of social reality and lived experience. Of course, as Unni Wikan (1995) stresses, life story-telling is not the only means by which lives and social worlds are made, and it is not even always the most important. Nonetheless, talkabout oneself, one's lifeis a crucial and pervasive human activity. The telling of stories is one of the practices by which people reflect, exercise agency, contest interpretations of things, make meanings, feel sorrow and hope, and live their lives. Storytelling, the narrative presentation of self and culture, whether it be for an anthropologist or practiced in the context of everyday life, is thus a creative social practice. Viewed through such a lens, life stories can offer scholars of humanity a compelling mode of probing both the particular and the more generalized dimensions of the ways people make, experience, and express their lives. Notes Acknowledgments. The idea for this article was originally inspired by a conversation with Judith Irvine. I benefited immensely as well from the critical comments of Diane Mines, along with those of Robert Desjarlais, McKim Marriott, Margaret Mills, and James Wilce. Fieldwork in India was generously supported by Fulbright-Hays, American Institute

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of Indian Studies, and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research fellowships. My deepest gratitude is reserved for the Bengali women who shared with me their stories. 1. The work on life stories or life histories in anthropology and cultural, feminist, and literary studies is vast. Some notable works include: those by Agar (1980), Becker (1997), Behar (1993, 1995), Brown (1999), Bruner (1988), Cain (1991), Crapanzano (1980, 1984, 19%), Desjarlais (2000), Frank (2000), Freeman (1979), Freeman and Krantz (1979), Geiger (1986), Gluck and Patai (1991), Gregg (1998), Grima (1992), Hill (1990), Hoskins (1985), Keesing (1985), Kendall (1988), Linde (1993), Miller et al. (1990), Mintz (1979,1989), Monks (1995), Patai (1988a, 1988b), Peacock and Holland (1993), Personal Narratives Group (1989), Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992), Runyan (1986), Saris (1995), Shostak (1981), Titon (1986), Trawick (1991,1992), Watson (1976), Watson and Watson-Franke (1985), Wikan (1995,19%), and Wilce (1998). 2. Bou means both wife and daughter-in-law or the wife/daughter-in-law of a household or village. Since, as we will see, Kayera Bou had no children, she kept her identity as "wife/daughter-in-law" (bou) rather than moving on to that of "mother," throughout her postmarital life. 3. For a more detailed look at practices prescribed for widows in West Bengal, their significance, and how they vary by caste and age, see Lamb 1993,1997b, 1999,2000. 4. Several scholars have asserted the importance of examining critically the ways anthropologists become active participants in producing the life histories of their informants (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1993:30-31; Behar 1995; Crapanzano 1980, 1984; Freeman and Krantz 1979). Often, the person at the center of the story is produced (perhaps problematically) as an isolated individual, following a birth-to-death trajectory. Shostak in Nisa, for instance, tellingly discusses how she strove to do just that but how she had difficulty finding an informant who would focus on her own life as an individual in a chronological birth-to-death sort of way (1981:37-39). 5. It is not uncommon in India for a new bride to be blamed if a misfortune befalls her marital family within a short time following the marriage. 6. Sucibai roga sickness (rog) consisting of a mania (bayu, bai) for cleanliness and purity (suci)is an illness state that in this region seemed to be especially common among upper-caste women who were experiencing strife with their husbands. Another woman I knew who was afflicted with sucibai rog was a Brahman wife whose husband was having an open affair with an untouchable woman. It seemed to me that for her and for Kayera Bou, the sucibai rog served as a means to maintain some sense of control over threatened, chaotic bodies and lives by almost fanatically limiting what goes into the body through constantly washing hands, clothes, and home; avoiding touching others (even one's own family members); and shunning sexual relations. I discuss this affliction in Lamb 2000:195-196 as well. 7. Alta is a red dye used by married women, and sometimes unmarried girls, to color the sides of their feet. It is thought to be attractive, and its redness also signifies auspiciousness, fertility, and marriage. 8. Pranam is a respectful gesture whereby a junior bows down before a senior person or deity and symbolically or physically takes the dust from the senior's feet. 9. Red vermilion or sindur worn in the part of the hair signifies a Bengali woman's marital status, auspiciousness, and fertile sexuality. 10. Throughout North India, young widows are commonly referred to by the derogatory term randi, meaning widow, prostitute, slut. The overlapping meanings of the term point to the widely perceived dangerousness of a young widow's uncontained sexuality and to the economic vulnerability of widows as well, some of whom do turn to prostitution as one of their only means of survival (see also Das 1979:97-98; Harlan 1995:218; Lamb 1999,2000:221; Minturn 1993:235-236). 11. My approach in this section is inspired by Ruth Behar's analyses of the life story of a Mexican marketing woman (1993,1995:149). 12. Linguists and anthropologists have long examined the properties of language as a mode of action. See, for example, Austin 1962; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs 1992; Hanks 1989:103,1990:4,9-10; Hymes 1974; Irvine 1990:131; Malinowski 1935,1938; Searle 1%9,1979; Silverstein 1976; and Wilce 1998.

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13. Most middle- and lower-caste communities in West Bengal favor remarriage for young widows, especially when they are childless. Even though widow remarriage was made officially legal for all castes by the British in 1856, Brahmans and some of the other highest-caste groups in West Bengal rarely allow their widows to remarry, even if the widow is a childless girl. For further discussions of widow remarriage in India, see Carrol 1983, Chen and Dreze 1992, and Lamb 1999. 14. Diane Mines develops this pointthat the ways people talk about the past relate to what they want to make in the futurein her "Hindu Nationalism, Untouchable Reform, and the Ritual Making of a South Indian Village" (n.d.). 15. Lila Abu-Lughod focuses Writing Women's Worlds on women's stories but not on "life" stories or "life" histories per se; she argues (drawing on Crapanzano 1984) that "the whole notion of a 'life' may not be meaningful for everyone and that conventions for talking about oneself may differ radically" (1993:30). 16. I was studying aging and gender (Lamb 1993,1997a, 1997b, 1999,2000). 17. In Lamb 1999,1 make this argument in greater detail. 18. Malavika Karlekar examines the narrated life story of a 19th-century Bengali Brahman widow, Nistarini Debi, who similarly paints the picture of marriage as a charade (1995:151-153), especially the now-outmoded practice of Kulin polygamous marriage, in which the highest ranking Bengali Brahman men traveled around to wed numerous wives, leaving them all as lifelong widows in the event of death, even those young women who had only met their husbands once on their wedding day. 19. See Lamb 1999 for an elaboration of this argument. 20. I discuss Billo's Ma's story as well, in more detail, in Lamb 1997a:65-68. 21. The women I met who never married were almost all from middle-class, well-educated backgrounds. 22. I am not intending to do full justice to the subtleties of any of these scholars' entire analyses hereeach of which I have found to be valuable and enlightening. I am simply highlighting the ways certain scholars' approaches have separated the living of life from life narrating. 23. Anthropologists can meaningfully scrutinize life narratives for different purposes, however. Those who take a "life history" approach are often very interested in the referential potential of narratives, the kinds of "information" the life narrative can reveal about actual (historical) events connected to the teller's past. 24. Notable exceptions include Behar (1993,1995) and Jackson (19%), who scrutinize the ways that the telling of life stories is a part of lived life.

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Briggs, Charles L. 1992 "Since I Am a Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives": Gender, Reported Speech, and the (Re)Production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing. American Ethnologist 19(2):337-361. Brown, Karen McCarthy 1999 Telling a Life: Race, Memory, and Historical Consciousness. Anthropology and Humanism 24(2):148-154. Bruner, Edward M., ed. 1988 Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Cain, Carole 1991 Personal Stories: Identity Acquisition and Self-Understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ethos 19(2):210-253. Carrol, Lucy 1983 Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Women's Remarriage Act of 1856. Indian Economic and Social History Review 20(4):363-389. Chakravarti, Uma 1995 Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Female Sexuality, Surveillance and the State in 18th Century Maharashtra. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 29(l-2):3-21. Chen, Marty, and Jean Dreze 1992 Widows and Well-Being in Rural North India. The Development Economics Research Programme, 40. London: London School of Economics. Crapanzano, Vincent 1980 Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984 Life Histories. American Anthropologist 86(4):953-960. 1996 Self-Centering Narratives. In Natural Histories of Discourse. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds. Pp. 106-127. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Das, Veena 1979 Reflections on the Social Construction of Adulthood. In Identity and Adulthood. Sudhir Kakar, ed. Pp. 89-104. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Desjarlais, Robert 2000 Echoes of a Yolmo Buddhist's Life, in Death. Cultural Anthropology 15(2):260-293. Frank, Gelya 2000 Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America. Berkeley: University of California Press Freeman, James M. 1979 Untouchable: An Indian Life History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Freeman, James M., and David L. Krantz 1979 The Unfulfilled Promise of Life Histories. Biography 3(1):1-13. Geiger, Susan N. G. 1986 Women's Life Histories: Method and Content. Signs 11(2):334-351. Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai, eds. 1991 Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge. Gregg, Gary S. 1998 Culture, Personality, and the Multiplicity of Identity: Evidence from North African Life Narratives. Ethos 26(2): 120-152. Grima, Benedicte 1992 The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women: "The Misfortunes which Have Befallen Me." Austin: University of Texas Press. Hanks, William F. 1989 Text and Textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18:95-127. 1990 Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harlan, Lindsey 1995 Abandoning Shame: Mira and the Margins of Marriage. In From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture. Lindsey Harlan and Paul Courtright, eds. Pp. 204-227. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Mintz, Sidney 1979 The Anthropological Interview and the Life History. Oral History Review 7(l):18-26. 1989 The Sensation of Moving, while Standing Still. American Ethnologist 16(4)786-796. Monks, Judith 1995 Life Stories and Sickness Experience: A Performance Perspective. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 19(4):453-478. Ortner, Sherry 1984 Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1 ):126-166. Patai, Daphne 1988a Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1988b Constructing a Self: A Brazilian Life Story. Feminist Studies 14(1):143-166. Peacock, James L., and Dorothy C. Holland 1993 The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process (a Review Article). Ethos 21(4):367-383. Personal Narratives Group 1989 Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold 1994 Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosenwald, George C , and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. 1992 Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding. New Haven: Yale University Press. Runyan, William McKinley 1986 Life Histories in Anthropology: Another View. American Anthropologist 88(1): 181-183. Saris, A. Jamie 1995 Telling Stories: Life Histories, Illness Narratives, and Institutional Landscapes. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 19(l):39-72. Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979 Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seymour, Susan C. 1999 Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shostak, Marjorie 1981 Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. New York: Random House. Silverstein, Michael 1976 Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthropology. Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, eds. Pp. 11-55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Titon, Jeff Todd 1986 The Life Story. Journal of American Folklore 93(2):276-292. Trawick, Margaret 1991 Wandering Lost: A Landless Laborer's Sense of Place and Self. In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills, eds. Pp. 224-266. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1992 Untouchability and the Fear of Death in a Tamil Song. In Language and the Politics of Emotion. Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. Pp. 186-206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Lawrence. 1976 Understanding a Life History as a Subjective Document: Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Perspectives. Ethos 4(1 ):95-l 31. Watson, Lawrence, and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke 1995 Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropological Inquiry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Wikan, Unni 1995 The Self in a World of Urgency and Necessity. Ethos 23(3):259-285. 1996 The Nun's Story: Reflections on an Age-Old, Postmodern Dilemma. American Anthropologist 98(2):279-289. Wilce, James M. 1998 The Pragmatics of "Madness": Performance Analysis of a Bangladeshi Woman's "Aberrant" Lament. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 22(l):l-54.