“I Don’t Need to Sit in Front of Any Kind of Deity”: Rejecting Domestic Shrine Traditions as a Chore and Negotiating Domestic Labor

For the women I explore in this chapter, domestic shrine traditions have no personal or social value. As a result these traditions have become a chore in both name and experience. Here, I use the term “chore” to refer to a form of labor that feels burdensome, is unpaid, and is perceived by the person performing it as lacking in value, yet is labor that one is expected to perform. The chapter provides a detailed profile of three first-generation Bengali American women who do not value domestic shrine traditions as a way to connect to deities or family, or to care for their children, and therefore decided years earlier not to maintain a regular domestic shrine tradition. Importantly, these women’s rejection of an elaborate domestic shrine tradition also allowed them to resist unequal domestic labor divisions and negotiate the content of their reproductive labor. Thus, these women’s stories illustrate how, as a form of labor, domestic shrine traditions are shaped by and respond to household labor divisions, and can therefore function as a site of labor negotiation.