Delhi’s Meatscapes

Delhi’s Meatscapes PDF Author: Zarin Ahmad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199095388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Tracing the journey of meat from the farm to the meat shop and other workspaces of the butcher within the multi-sited margins in Delhi, the current volume intimately follows the lives of Qureshi butchers and other meat sector workers in this transforming mega-city. The author addresses the tensions that meat throws up in a bristling society whose stakes are now more than ever intense. She shows how meat is also a rising sector in the Indian economy, and fetches precious foreign exchange. Qureshi butchers stand at the crossroads of class, caste, stigma, religion, market, urban ecological policies, and a never-ceasing political debate around these issues. Delhi's Meatscapes brings together rare archival documents, vernacular sources, and ethnographic insights gleaned from several years of immersion in the city's meatscapes and is the first of its kind for urban anthropologists, economists, political scientists, policy planners and readers who wish to take a hard look at their own (non-)meat choices.

Delhi’s Meatscapes

Delhi’s Meatscapes PDF Author: Zarin Ahmad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199095388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tracing the journey of meat from the farm to the meat shop and other workspaces of the butcher within the multi-sited margins in Delhi, the current volume intimately follows the lives of Qureshi butchers and other meat sector workers in this transforming mega-city. The author addresses the tensions that meat throws up in a bristling society whose stakes are now more than ever intense. She shows how meat is also a rising sector in the Indian economy, and fetches precious foreign exchange. Qureshi butchers stand at the crossroads of class, caste, stigma, religion, market, urban ecological policies, and a never-ceasing political debate around these issues. Delhi's Meatscapes brings together rare archival documents, vernacular sources, and ethnographic insights gleaned from several years of immersion in the city's meatscapes and is the first of its kind for urban anthropologists, economists, political scientists, policy planners and readers who wish to take a hard look at their own (non-)meat choices.

Dhobis of Delhi

Dhobis of Delhi PDF Author: Subhadra Mitra Channa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198926219
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Dhobis of Delhi: An Urban Ethnography from the Margins, 1974–2023 is a saga covering more than four decades of interactions with an 'untouchable' caste--the Dhobis (washermen and washerwomen), who are among Delhi's oldest inhabitants. It describes their ways of life, economy, livelihood, struggles, and adaptation to the city's changing demographic, cultural, and politico-economic profile. Utilizing an experiential perspective and a gendered and feminist approach, the author elaborates on the Dhobi identity, which is focused on their community (biradari), and discusses their struggles to be identified as skilled professionals at par with others, rejecting at the same time the political identity of being Dalit. Discarding their earlier subjugated sense of the self, the Dhobis are developing an emerging consciousness as democratic citizens, nurturing ambitions of a future where they will find acceptance as a community. To that end, the book also analyses how their marginalized caste-based occupation and skills ensure for them a livelihood and viability within the market economy. Highlighting the community's strategies and tactics of survival and resilience against all odds, Dhobis of Delhi is thus the story of a city viewed through the eyes of those who live on the lowest rung of its social hierarchy but whose contribution to the life of the city is essential, albeit invisible.

Studies in Religion and the Everyday

Studies in Religion and the Everyday PDF Author: Farhana Ibrahim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198902786
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Studies in Religion and the Everyday is a collection of essays addressing the contours of religious beliefs and practices in the context of everyday life in India. Events and processes in contemporary India--especially post the 1990s--have contributed to distinct modes of articulating religious practices. This volume is an attempt to historicize--and problematize--the categorization of religion as a universally held and analytically distinct feature of human life and seeks to understand the conditions--historical, political, discursive--and processes of authorization under which a particular set of practices, values, and dispositions constitutes the 'religious' at a specific point in time. By bringing together studies that draw from diverse methodological and epistemological approaches, the book will serve as a useful introduction to religion in India for the general reader and as an indispensable resource for students and researchers. The volume presents fresh perspectives on existing fields of study such as the city, capital, minorities, secularization, and the state--no longer seen as distinct from religion but actively co-produced with religion in the context of the theoretical rubric of the everyday--thereby marking a departure from approaching the question of religion solely through the lens of identity and conflict.

Natura Urbana

Natura Urbana PDF Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046288
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy’s fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences,and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.

The Oxford Handbook of Caste

The Oxford Handbook of Caste PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198896735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines—sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of 'traditional' and 'modern'; the 'East' and the 'West'; or the 'closed' and 'open' systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.

Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims

Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims PDF Author: Tanweer Fazal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000901947
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India. Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India PDF Author: Kalyani Devaki Menon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

A People's Constitution

A People's Constitution PDF Author: Rohit De
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

Indifference

Indifference PDF Author: Naisargi N. Davé
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478027134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference---that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.

Lively Cities

Lively Cities PDF Author: Maan Barua
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452969663
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
A journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urban One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the planet, and cities are replete with nonhuman life. Yet current accounts of the urban remain resolutely anthropocentric. Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. From macaques and cattle in Delhi to the invasive parakeet colonies in London, Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. He reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure, the built environment, design, habitation, and everyday practices of dwelling and provides a critical intervention in animal and urban studies. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how human and nonhuman actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. Through novel combinations of ethnography and ethology, and focusing on interlocutors that are not the usual suspects animating urban theory, Barua’s work considers nonhuman lifeworlds and the differences they make in understanding urbanicity. Lively Cities is an agenda-setting intervention, ultimately proposing a new grammar of urban life.