New Books Network Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)
Mar 26, 2026
Tulasi Srinivas, an anthropologist of religion and urban life, explores contemporary beauty parlors in Bangalore as sites of social life and meaning. She discusses how salons connect technology, mythology, and gender through stories of goddesses and ethical practice. Conversations cover methods, class and caste dynamics, and how beauty practices shape moral imaginaries.
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Salons As Sacred Ethical Spaces
- Beauty parlors in Bangalore function as unexpectedly sacred social spaces where clients narrate myths and negotiate identity.
- Tulasi Srinivas discovered salon conversations weave Hindu goddess stories into everyday ethics across class and religion, reshaping beauty into moral practice.
Goddess Attributes Structure Salon Worlds
- Srinivas frames salon practices through goddess attributes: allure, radiance, woundedness, fertility, and gender fluidity.
- Each chapter maps a goddess quality (e.g., Lakshmi's radiance → whitening creams) to concrete salon techniques and aspirations.
Fieldwork Fueled By Texts And TikToks
- Srinivas collected data as a 'magpie' through long-term fieldwork, notebooks, Zoom, texts, images, and TikTok during the pandemic.
- Beauticians and clients continuously messaged screen grabs, gifs, and festival goddess images, flooding her phone with rich ethnographic material.
