ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the prescriptive and practical boundaries of womanhood that were enacted in women’s ritually mediated relations with other women and with men, and how these actions produce subjects who embody social relations of power but recognize and at times question those relations. The semiotic connections among objects, women’s bodies, and conceptions of womanhood were reproduced and reconfigured in the course of everyday life—in special events like Matimancal and in ordinary actions associated with hygiene and cooking. Women’s auspi-ciousness, constructed and appropriated through calendric ritual, feeds back into the space-time macrocosm itself. The auspicious potentialities of femininity, and the auspiciousness of particular women, are enhanced by the ritual positioning of women at the critical macrocosmic transitions that calendars mark. Marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, though central to women’s lives, were treated within the canonical discourses on samskaras as transitions in the male life cycle.
