Author: Asha Achuthan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040152600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This is a book about the dai, or traditional birth practitioner, and her place in the emerging therapeutic domain in colonial and contemporary India. The book employs a caste-informed feminist reading of the colonial archive against the grain and explores papers by Englishwomen physicians, texts of indigenous medicine and practitioner accounts, administrative documents, public commentaries, and legislative assembly debates from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also examines contemporary healthcare policy discourse. Using these methodologies, the author traces the production of the dai as an unsanitary, unskilled indigenous figure in colonial and nationalist accounts. The book goes on to examine the workings of gender and caste in the setting up of this figure, at first for containment and then for removal from institutionalized healthcare – an exercise that is more or less completed in the present. The author argues that this exercise is part of the refashioning of the indigenous, and of indigenous medicine, throughout this period, into a highly codified domain that centres caste privilege and is supported by global capital networks. In such a refashioning, the dai figure is rendered remote not only from the centre of the healthcare apparatus but also from the centre of the contemporary nation. This genealogical tracing of indigenous medicine in Indian contexts, rather than separate histories, is also useful to understand better what is termed the healthcare assemblage today, and this book provides a ground on which this can be done.
Author: René Harder Horst
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813070015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
"Engaged, nuanced, and accessible--this untold story of Paraguay's indigenous peoples constitutes an important addition to the English-language literature on this understudied country."--John Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "Provides original insights into the makings of indigenous policy during Paraguay's Stroessner era and the democratic opening after 1989 . . . shows how state policies were buffeted by external actors but also how indigenous peoples fought back. A must-read for those interested in indigenous policy in Latin America."-- Erick D. Langer, Georgetown University "A significant contribution to the field . . . It develops a rich understanding of continuities and change in Paraguayan history, including the role of religious missions in indigenous assimilation and/or cultural preservation."--Virginia Garrard Burnett, University of Texas, Austin Native groups have played an important historical role in Paraguay, the most homogenous and the only officially bilingual country in Latin America. This book analyzes their complex relationship with the corrupt Alfredo Stroessner regime (1954-89), which framed its policies as inclusive but excluded Paraguay's indigenous people from the benefits of national development and the most basic human rights. However, this is not a history of oppression and victimhood but rather a study in manipulation. Horst argues that while native people struggled daily to secure food and work under Stroessner's often contradictory and heavy-handed policies, they refused to disappear anonymously into the larger peasant population. As savvy actors who manipulated difficult circumstances to foil exclusionary policies, they succeeded in publicly embarrassing the regime as often as possible through exposures of state corruption. Working in close cooperation with the Catholic Church, indigenous peoples capitalized on Catholic legal advocacy in their struggles to defend their territories and resources. The church became the strongest defender of native land claims, drawing international attention to the plight of indigenous peoples as well as abuses of human rights. While indigenous resistance weakened support for the Stroessner regime, it also drove native leaders and peoples into closer interaction with and dependency upon the very national institutions they opposed. Contributing their own vision of a multiethnic state, the native people of Paraguay created multiple alliances with regime opponents, found ways to draw attention to human rights, and by demanding tolerance of ethnic plurality helped lead the nation toward greater democracy in 1992. Horst's study--the only history to focus on recent social policies and national political strategies for indigenous populations in modern Paraguay-- provides an important narrative for historians of Paraguay and other parts of Latin America, as well as for anthropologists and others interested in the intersection of identity politics and human rights. René Harder Horst is associate professor of history at Appalachian State University.
Author: María L. O. Muñoz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816533792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In 1975 a watershed moment captivated Mexico as indigenous peoples from across the country came together on the Island of Janitzio for the First National Congress of Indigenous Peoples. The congress was a federal government initiative intended to preempt an independent indigenous movement. But indigenous groups circumvented the intended containment policies of the congress and made bold demands for political self-determination. Using previously unavailable documents, María L. O. Muñoz examines the events that led to the congress, the meeting itself, and developments after the assembly. Muñoz shows how indigenous leaders working within Mexico’s Department of Colonization and Agrarian Affairs (DAAC) sidestepped state attempts to control indigenous communities, and how they made bold demands that redefined the ways federal and state governments engaged with pueblos indígenas. Through research in previously untapped archives, Muñoz is able to trace the political history of the indigenous leaders and government officials who redefined the ways indigenous peoples engaged with governments. She illustrates the fluid and evolving power relationships of the key players with a focus on the twelve years of populism in the last decades of the twentieth century. This book challenges the discourse of unquestioned power and hegemony of the national ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and it illustrates how indigenous communities in Mexico reimagined their roles in the social, political, and economic life of the nation.
Author: Carol Siegel
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814779996
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common? All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora. But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow—the flood—that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire. [ go to the Genders website ]
Author: Ranjana Saha
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100090539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
1) This is one of the first systematic historical account of Medical Advice about Breastfeeding in Colonial Calcutta. 2) It has rich archival sources like rare medical handbooks and periodicals, governmental proceedings, child welfare exhibition and conference reports, personal papers, memoirs, illustrations and advertisements. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of social history and colonial history across UK.
Author: Alexander S. Dawson
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816541760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico, both intellectuals and government officials promoted ethnic diversity while attempting to overcome the stigma of race in Mexican society. Programs such as the Indigenista movement represented their efforts to redeem the Revolution's promise of a more democratic future for all citizens. This book explores three decades of efforts on the part of government officials, social scientists, and indigenous leaders to renegotiate the place of native peoples in Mexican society. It traces the movement's origins as a humanitarian cause among intellectuals, the involvement of government in bringing education, land reform, cultural revival, and social research to Indian communities, and the active participation of Indian peoples. Traditionally, scholars have seen Indigenismo as an elitist formulation of the "Indian problem." Dawson instead explores the ways that the movement was mediated by both elite and popular pressures over time. By showing how Indigenismo was used by a variety of actors to negotiate the shape of the revolutionary state—from anthropologist Manual Gamio to President Lázaro Cárdenas—he demonstrates how it contributed to a new "pact of domination" between indigenous peoples and the government. Although the power of the Indigenistas was limited by the face that "Indian" remained a racial slur in Mexico, the indígenas capacitados empowered through Indigenismo played a central role in ensuring seventy years of PRI hegemony. In studying the confluence of state formation, social science, and native activism, Dawson's book offers a new perspective for understanding the processes through which revolutionary hegemony emerged.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 1400
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Book Description
Author: Erick Detlef Langer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0842026797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The efforts of Indians in Latin America have gained momentum and garnered increasing attention in the last decade as they claim rights to their land and demand full participation in the political process. This issue is of rising importance as ecological concerns and autochtonous movements gain a foothold in Latin America, transforming the political landscape into one in which multiethnic democracies hold sway. In some cases, these movements have led to violent outbursts that severely affected some nations, such as the 1992 and 1994 Indian uprisings in Ecuador. In most cases, however, grassroots efforts have realized success without bloodshed. An Aymara Indian, head of an indigenous-rights political party, became Vice President of Bolivia. Brazilian lands are being set aside for indigenous groups not as traditional reservations where the government attempts to 'civilize' the hunters and gatherers, but where the government serves only to keep loggers, gold miners, and other interlopers out of tribal lands. Contemporary Indigenous Movements in Latin America is a collection of essays compiled by Professor Erick D. Langer that brings together-for the first time-contributions on indigenous movements throughout Latin America from all regions. Focusing on the 1990s, Professor Langer illustrates the range and increasing significance of the Indian movements in Latin America. The volume addresses the ways in which Indians have confronted the political, social, and economic problems they face today, and shows the diversity of the movements, both in lowlands and in highlands, tribal peoples, and peasants. The book presents an analytical overview of these movements, as well as a vision of how and why they have become so important in the late twentieth century. Contemporary Indigenous Movements in Latin America is important for those interested in Latin American studies, including Latin American civilization, Latin American anthropology, contemporary issues in Latin America, and ethnic studies.
Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786743
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.
Author: Christa Wichterich
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9390514010
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
The recent global pandemic highlighted the crucial role played by (mostly female) care workers in providing health services across the world. At the same time, it exposed the deep vulnerabilities and precarities of their lives—abysmally low wages, long working hours, social prejudice, notorious undervaluation—at the hands of an uncaring and exploitative economic system. The editors of this volume identify this as ‘care extractivism’, a strategy that enables the simultaneous extraction and undervaluation of care work, something in which governments and societies are both complicit. Further, they point to the impact of liberalization and professionalization on the political economy of nursing wherein the market principle of cost efficiency leads to informalization, contract labour and hierarchization of nursing in both private and public hospitals. The contributors to this important and timely book draw attention to the varied histories of health care work in India and of Indian nurses abroad. They look also at the recent struggles through which workers have tried to improve their working conditions and which represent a silver lining as they imbibe the potential to disrupt the chain of undervaluation, cost cutting, and poor quality healthcare.
