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A reconsideration of the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge.
At South Indian village funerals, women cry and lament, men drink and laugh, and untouchables sing and joke to the beat of their drums. No One Cries for the Dead offers an original interpretation of these behaviors, which seem almost unrelated to the dead and to the funeral event. Isabelle Clark-Decès demonstrates that rather than mourn the dead, these Tamil funeral songs first and foremost give meaning to the caste, gender, and personal experiences of the performers.
A reconsideration of the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge.
This volume seeks to introduce and deepen the understanding of Islam and its role in politics as encountered in different national and transnational contexts in Southeast Asia, eschewing the neo-orientalist approach that has informed public discourse in recent years. In Encountering Islam, the book lingers beyond the summary moment and reflects on the multiple impressions, suppressions and repressions, whether coherent or incoherent, associated with Islam as a socio-political force in public life. To this end, it is not adequate simply to represent the divergent identities associated with Islam in Southeast Asia, whether embedded in state-endorsed orthodoxy or Islamic movements that contest such orthodoxy. It is also important to examine religious minorities in political contexts where Islam is dominant and Muslim communities in national contexts where they are minorities. By situating these religious identities within their larger socio-political contexts, this volume seeks to provide a more holistic understanding of what is encountered as Islam in Southeast Asia.
This ethnography of everyday policing practices in Lucknow, a major Indian metropolis, demonstrates how police authority and its assumed afflictions are refracted through a multi-dimensional field of social relationships in which power positions and moral boundaries are continually contested and shifting. This field generates among police what legal anthropologist Beatrice Jauregui calls provisional authority, a fractured and contingent form of capability and subjectivity that is not always immediately visible or comprehensible. Provisional authority may provide a social good, but with questionable and transmutable efficacy or legitimacy. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology, legal histo...
How do ordinary people respond when their lives are irrevocably altered by terror and violence? Susanna Trnka was residing in an Indo-Fijian village in the year 2000 during the Fijian nationalist coup. The overthrow of the elected multiethnic party led to six months of nationalist aggression, much of which was directed toward Indo-Fijians. In State of Suffering, Trnka shows how Indo-Fijians' lives were overturned as waves of turmoil and destruction swept across Fiji. Describing the myriad social processes through which violence is articulated and ascribed meaning-including expressions of incredulity, circulation of rumors, narratives, and exchanges of laughter and jokes-Trnka reveals the way...
This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mob...
The Sathya Sai global civil religious movement incorporates Hindu and Muslim practices, Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences, and "New Age"-style rituals and beliefs. Shri Sathya Sai Baba, its charismatic and controversial leader, attracts several million adherents from various national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. In a dynamic account of the Sathya Sai movement's explosive growth, Winged Faith argues for a rethinking of globalization and the politics of identity in a religiously plural world. This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an alternate understanding of difference and contestation. It considers how acts of "sacred spectating" and illusion, "moral stakeholding" and the problems of community are debated and experienced. A thrilling study of a transcultural and transurban phenomenon that questions narratives of self and being, circuits of sacred mobility, and the politics of affect, Winged Faith suggests new methods for discussing religion in a globalizing world and introduces readers to an easily critiqued yet not fully understood community.
The speed and scale of urbanisation in India is unprecedented almost anywhere in the world and has tremendous global implications. The religious influence on the urban experience has resonances for all aspects of urban sustainability in India and yet it remains a blind spot while articulating sustainable urban policy. This book explores the historical and on-going influence of religion on urban planning, design, space utilisation, urban identities and communities. It argues that the conceptual and empirical approaches to planning sustainable cities in India need to be developed out of analytical concepts that define local sense of place and identity. Examining how Hindu religious heritage, b...
“Amy Borovoy has beautifully portrayed the dilemmas of being female in modern Japan, and the nuanced grace with which these women manage their particular difficulties. She has created an indelible portrait of the way women struggle with the eternal questions of being mothers and wives, in particularly Japanese ways, and the ways in which they reflect upon and manage their lives. It is a remarkable book.”—Tanya Luhrmann, Max Palevsky Professor in the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago