In the conclusion to Death, Beauty, Struggle, Margaret Trawick discusses six “threads” that weave the book together: time and change, place and movement, environment and ecology, song and creation, separation and untouchability, and womanhood. Four others are identified by Anne Grodzins Gold in the foreword: gender and social justice, emotions and ecologies, interpretation of divine and moral biographies, and “unrepentant” anthropology. These ten intertwine with the main themes identified in the book's title, Death, Beauty, Struggle. Following all of these threads is not possible in a brief review of this ambitious, complex, and humane book. Rather, I will trace three threads not foregrounded by Trawick that wend their way throughout the body of this book: author and subject, silent and audible voices, and translation.

Chapters 1 through 6 focus on the stories and songs of untouchable Tamil women through their own perspectives and Trawick's. In some chapters, several players are present; living untouchable women, deities that inhabit these women, collectivities of women, and Trawick herself. Questions of authorship and subjectivity are intermingled in various ways in this mix of characters, each capable of filling the role of author or subject. The dual role of subject and author is most visible in the central figures of living, untouchable women. They are Trawick's subjects, but also authors of their own stories (the autobiographies of chapters 1 and 6), the stories of deities who possess them, and of the collectives of women whom they also represent. The narratives are multi-layered and deal with the death and struggle of women about whom they narrate and about themselves. On either side of these woman are the subjects of their narratives (deities, other untouchable women) and the narrator of their own stories (Trawick). But even at these extremes, authorship and subjectivity are entangled. In chapter 1, an untouchable woman, Sarasvati, narrates the story of Mariamman, a centuries-old Brahman woman, betrayed by husband and son, resurrected and deified as a mixed-caste woman with the head of a Brahman and the body of an untouchable. When possessed by Mariamman, Sarasvati retells Mariamman's story, who in turn controls much of Sarasvati's behavior. This type of co-authorship appears again in the book's conclusion, where Trawick comments on how untouchable women assisted in authoring her story: “Though I just wanted to be treated like a normal person … my reputation preceded me, attributing traits to me that I never had. But, what I learned from each of the women whose words I heard changed me” (p. 213).

This ethnography's subtitle is Untouchable Women Create the World. For whom? The silenced voices of untouchables and especially of women are a compelling issue in perhaps untouchable women's most creative genre, song. Trawick writes, “The words of their songs, though not the music of them, were hidden from public ears by the singers themselves. Thus the meanings were doubly concealed” (p. 72). The oppression the Paraiyar women of chapter 2 experienced “was not a difficult thing for them to see, but it was dangerous to say” (p. 73) because of the risks involved. So, when they made them audible, Paraiyar women concealed their messages by encoding them in such a way as to make them interpretable only to themselves, not to more powerful others. But they did sing them, exposing their beauty to Trawick, whose translation becomes all the more critical because she is their exclusive audience.

It is the job of anthropology to translate the words and experiences of one people to another, often through processes that are not made explicit. The results can be opaque, rigid, and singular, rather than transparent, fluid, and multi-vocal. Because of how thickly encoded untouchable women's songs are, Trawick leads us through their interpretation, without which I, for one, would not have known what to make of many of them. Here, Trawick is masterful. As she shows, songs cannot be completely understood through the words they contain, nor even in the contexts or histories in which they exist. Songs are also expressed through movements of the body, their volume, and their tone. Meaning is further shaped by devices used in, or omitted from, poetics. Trawick's sophistication as a linguist enables the reader to grasp the many layers of meaning in a song. Occasionally, she puts too firm a point on one interpretation where several might be allowed for, but that is a minor concern. More importantly, she enables the reader to understand elusive ideas; for example, how “what I perceived as inadvertent confusion [over verb tense] on the part of the singer was not inadvertent at all” (p. 122).

It is hard to do justice to this book in so few words. It is wonderfully crafted, stylistically lithe but intellectually complex. Trawick offers readers of many interests, from senior scholars to graduate and undergraduate students, an ethnography of deep engagement, of humanity witnessed through her nimble translation of stories and song, of subject and author through their silenced and audible voices.