ABSTRACT
A central discourse of kinship in Aruloor concerns the fact that children are primarily constituted of their mother’s blood: Female blood is of great symbolic importance among all the Non-Brahmin castes. All the castes depict menarchal women as being potentially dangerous to men, but this is particularly true of the Brahminical castes. Perhaps because astrology is primarily a Brahminic science in which Brahmins themselves have the greatest interest, Brahmins’ normative tendency to represent women as subordinate to men is strongly emphasized in astrological discourse. This explicit gender hierarchization is most vividly apparent in the astrological rules for matching marriage-horoscopes. Two very different views of menstruation interact in Aruloor, making astrological representations a prime example of cultural contestation between the Non-Brahmin and the Brahminical castes. Pubescent female fertility is understood as being controlled by powerful astrological influences. “Natcattiram” literally means “star” or “lunar constellation,” but it refers to the entire astrological conjunction that influences a horoscope at a particular time.
