South Asia Center Presents: Lucinda Ramberg

South Asia Center co-sponsored by Department of AnthropologyPresents: Lucinda Ramberg Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University Clinical Encounters and Citizenship Projects in South India Dedicated to a South Indian goddess, devadasis are priests in a healing cult whose non-monogamous sexuality has been designated as prostitution and subjected to eradication by the state. This paper considers them in two ways they cross the threshold of the clinic, as “vectors of disease” and as sex worker peer educators, in order to think about the biopolitical character of citizenship in postcolonial India.