“It’s a Connection”: Valuing Domestic Shrine Traditions as Relational Labor and Sustaining Ethno-Religious Subjectivities and Traditions in the United States

This chapter analyzes how Bengali American women value their domestic shrine traditions as a relational labor through which they maintain for themselves and transmit to their American-born children relationships with the families and household cultures that they miss, and the Bengali Hindu subjectivity that they fear losing in the United States. Most Bengali American women described the experience of missing their families and natal household culture as the initial impetus for them to establish a shrine and develop a domestic worship ritual in the United States. Performing some of the household rituals they had watched their families perform helps them connect to and teach to their children the Bengali Hindu identities and ways of being that are encapsulated in domestic shrine traditions. Notably, as I will also show throughout this chapter, women consistently told me that the public temple cannot provide them and their families with these intimate relational connections to either family or natal identity. Thus, this chapter reflects a broader aim of the book to value the unique role that women’s domestic shrine traditions play in the articulation and sustenance of ethno-religious traditions and subjectivities in the United States.