Hunting for Monsters (and Gods): The Making of an Anthropologist

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Title	Hunting for Monsters (and Gods)
Subtitle	The Making of an Anthropologist
Contributor	Indira Arumugam(author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.53288/0361.1.08
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/living-with-monsters-ethnographic-fiction-about-real-monsters/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Indira Arumugam
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2023-05-11
Long abstract	This chapter is about how hunting for monsters, and gods, has become part of how I do ethnographic fieldwork. The village of Vaduvur in Tamil Nadu, South India is where my family originates as well as where I was born and subsequently migrated from. Vaduvur is also my ethnographic field site. Beginning with how fieldwork for my dissertation on sacrificial rituals prompted memories about tales of uncanny fertility spirits called “Mini” told by my mother, this chapter considers how stories have framed the cultivation of an anthropological imagination and sensibility. Dwelling upon how stories constitute a particular village, its past, peoples and ambience, this chapter is specifically concerned with how monstrous beings or at least the myths about them allow for mapping, inhabiting, and staking claims to a place. Drawing both on my memories of the childhood stories and my experiences of doing fieldwork, this chapter relates how the different, manifold, and even contradictory stories about monsters represent competing stakes over a place. Monsters menace. However, they are part of the memories of and enduring moorings to a much-missed home. Monsters pulse with an uncanny charisma that fascinates across spaces, cultures, and time.
Page range	pp. 113–131
Print length	19 pages
Language	English (Original)
Keywords	Tamil Nadu stories ethnographic fieldwork migration memories the uncanny

Contributors

Indira Arumugam

(author)

National University of Singapore

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7623-6517

Indira Arumugam is an anthropologist who works in Tamil Nadu, South India and among the Tamil Diaspora in Singapore and Southeast Asia. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include vernacular political imaginaries, ritual theories and practices, intimate economics of (re)production, modalities of sacrality and monstrosity, play and pleasure and popular Hinduism. Her writings on animal sacrifice, divine agency, rituals, the gift, and kinship have appeared in leading journals of anthropology, religion, and Asian Studies. She is currently working on book on vernacular political theorizing entitled, Visceral Politics: Intimate Imaginaries of Power in South India.