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

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.