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Children and Knowledge sheds light on what it is to be a child in India in the contemporary moment and in history. While acknowledging the ways Indian children are situated within structures of power, this volume foregrounds innovative methodologies for conducting research into childhood and children’s lives that meaningfully engage with young people’s understandings, stories and agency. The chapters probe conceptualisations of Indian childhoods, and interrogate both singularising models of childhood and the idea of ‘multiple childhoods’. The contributors use the theme 'children and knowledge' to analyse young people’s interactions with institutions of modernity and social structur...
The entanglement of law and religion is reiterated on a daily basis in India. Communities and groups turn to the courts to seek positive recognition of their religious identities or sentiments, as well as a validation of their practices. Equally, courts have become the most potent site of the play of conflicts and contradictions between religious groups. The judicial power thus not only arbiters conflicts but also defines what constitutes the ‘religious’, and demarcates its limits. This volume argues that the relationship between law and religion is not merely one of competing sovereignties – as rational law moulding religion in its reformist vision, and religion defending its turf aga...
This book engages with the ethics and practices of identity formation in a world experiencing identity stress. It engages with crucial questions such as: What models are shaping our view of ourselves and the society in which we live? What images ground our perception of what is true and real? How have the images been historically produced? What are the effects of such models on definitions of self? Should we break free from these images if we get to know what they are? Is it possible to change our models in order to create freer identities? Through a range of distinctive lenses, the essays in the volume deals with the ideas of the ‘liminal self’, the ‘digital self’, ‘identities in flux’, and offers up ‘anthropologies of self/selves’ that situates current identity processes within their cultures and explores strategies and dilemmas from this perspective. This key volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literary stories, critical theory, social theory, social anthropology, philosophy, and political philosophy.
Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays — from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities — locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors — social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups — examine projects from a practitioner’s perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.
Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. This volume provides readable ethnographic material for undergraduate courses, in whole or in part. It will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book,...
Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-politica...
Is the bicycle, like the loudspeaker, a medium of communication in India? Do Indian children need trade unions as much as they need schools? What would you do with a mobile phone if all your friends were playing tag in the rain or watching Indian Idol? Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cult...
This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by pat...
This book provides a conceptual toolkit to understand the changing technologies and dynamics of political campaigning in India. Examining political campaigning and party strategies across many Indian states, with special attention to regional politics, histories, cultures, social and technological contexts, the book discusses the potential impacts of campaign strategies on electoral outcomes. Political campaigning reached a tipping point with millions of social media users engaging online with family and friends, political issues, parties and candidates in India’s 2019 parliamentary election. Although India’s political parties had been working with consultants and professional advertisin...
The book discusses how we can cross-fertilize relationship between roots and routes with and beyond the logic of closure, monological assertions and violence. The book draws upon multiple philosophical, historical, religious and spiritual traditions of the world to rethink our conceptions and productions of identity as well as our conventional understanding of roots and routes. The book particularly explores the vision and practice of creativity, socio-cultural regeneration and planetary realizations to cultivate new pathways of identity realization and new relationship between identities and differences in our fragile world today. Trans-disciplinary in engagement and trans-civilizational in its dialogical pathway, the book is a unique contribution to our contemporary scholarship about ethnicity, identity, social creativity, cultural regeneration and planetary realizations.