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Front Cover
Back Cover
The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (paperback)
Author:
Tulasi Srinivas
ISBN:
9789376545605
Binding:
Paperback
Year:
2026
Pages:
297 with 32 b/w illustrations
Size:
16 x 24 cm
Price:
INR
1095.00
FORTHCOMING
About the Book
In
The Goddess in the Mirror
, Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty parlors in Bangalore. Exploring the gendered world of beauty in the intimate spaces of the salon, whose popularity has exploded amid an urban tech revolution, Srinivas invites readers to consider what beauty is and what it does. Visiting diverse salons that cater to various classes, castes, and queer sexualities, she tracks the relationships between clients and workers, revealing the beauty industry’s painful political, religious, and economic stakes. Embodiment, religion, and narrative intersect as clients and beauticians tell well-known stories of beautiful Hindu goddesses, heroines, queens, and apsaras, thereby weaving their own ethical subjectivities every day. Following the goddess’s allure, radiance, woundedness, fluidity, and fertility, Srinivas situates ideas of beauty within a larger moral and political context where beauty is both a fleeting pursuit and a rich resource for navigating a patriarchal present.
About the Author
Tulasi Srinivas
Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at Emerson College. She is the author of
The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder
and
Winged Faith: Rethinking Religious Pluralism and Globalization through the Satya Sai Movement
, and the coeditor, with Krishnendu Ray, of
Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia
.
Editorial Reviews
“Beautifully written and creatively argued,
The Goddess in the Mirror
presents an original perspective on beauty work that takes us beyond predictable and reductionist framings of the subject. Tulasi Srinivas’s moving ethnography innovatively tracks how Hindu myths and stories that customers and workers narrate offer paths to becoming.”
—Purnima Mankekar, coauthor of
The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City
“The work of beauty lends itself to philosophical speculation and to a sociology of neoliberal self-making. But the odor, press, shimmer, and grit of the bodies, relations, myths, and techniques assembling the contemporary life beautiful has seldom been as palpable as in Tulasi Srinivas’
The Goddess in the Mirror
. A stunning ethnographic achievement that leads its reader through the challenge and complexity of gendered recognition via situations comic, luminous, and horrifying.”
—Lawrence Cohen, author of
No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things
“[T]his is a valuable and nuanced book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle. In terms of disciplinary impact,
The Goddess in the Mirror
may well become a touchstone for integrating aesthetic and affective dimensions into analyses of power.”
—Gunjan Shekhawat,
LSE Review of Books
Customer Reviews
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