Author: Balmurli Natrajan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136647562
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy. Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste revitalizes castes as cultural communities so that the culture of a caste is produced, organized and naturalized in the process of transforming jati (fetishized blood and kinship) into samaj (fetishized culture). Castes are shown to not be homogenous cultural wholes but sites of hegemony where class, gender and hierarchy over-determine the meanings and materiality of caste. Arguing that there exists a new casteism in India akin to a new racism in the USA, built less on biology and descent and more on purported cultural differences and their rights to exist, the book presents an extended critique and a search for an alternative view of caste and anti-casteist politics. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian culture and society.
Author: Balmurli Natrajan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136647570
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy. Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste revitalizes castes as cultural communities so that the culture of a caste is produced, organized and naturalized in the process of transforming jati (fetishized blood and kinship) into samaj (fetishized culture). Castes are shown to not be homogenous cultural wholes but sites of hegemony where class, gender and hierarchy over-determine the meanings and materiality of caste. Arguing that there exists a new casteism in India akin to a new racism in the USA, built less on biology and descent and more on purported cultural differences and their rights to exist, the book presents an extended critique and a search for an alternative view of caste and anti-casteist politics. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian culture and society.
Author: Brahma Prakash
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199095841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.
Author: Markus Schleiter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429755619
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology, this book compares and contrasts the situation in South Asia with indigeneity globally. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.
Author: Balagangadhara,
Publisher: OUP India
ISBN: 0198082967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
This book presents a radical analysis of postcolonial studies as a discipline and modern India as a domain of study. It discusses wide variety of issues such as different definitions of culture, colonialism, secularism, and orientalist discourse.
Author: Balmurli Natrajan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788125036005
Category : Caste
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Historical barriers still inhibit compara-tive frameworks to map and challenge two of the most odious forms of discrimination-racism & casteism. Both justify themselves on a principle of biological descent; they enable stigma as if it were a natural fact, refusing to see it as deleterious social exclusion. Against Stigma carries fifteen essays that build upon the energies generated in scholarship as a result of the landmark 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance at Durban,South Africa. The contributors, represent a multiplicity of disciplines and intellectual orientations, explore comparative aspects of caste and race including conundrums of a globalized discourse and national problematics of racism and casteism. The editors whose Introduction locates this comparative project around descent-based discrimination in a wide context suggest that globalization holds out the promise of more generalized practices of resistance and emancipation by oppressed national minorities. A critical bibliography on race and caste is a bonus to students and teachers of Human Rights, Race Relations, Caste Studies and Politics of Socio-economic Exclusion. At a time when democratic movements are sweeping across the globe, Against Stigma presents a fresh selection of authoritative scholarship and instructive debates centred on race and caste, two of the most potent and divisive concepts in the histories of humanity, sociology and human governance.
Author: Leela Fernandes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000471284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
This new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia. The Handbook covers the central contributions that have defi ned this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focusing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new chapters, thus adding new areas of scholarship. The Handbook is organized thematically into five major parts: • Historical formations and theoretical framings • Law, citizenship and the nation • Representations of culture, place, identity • Labor and the economy • Inequality, activism and the state The Handbook illustrates the ways in which scholarship on gender has contributed to a rethink of theoretical concepts and empirical understandings of contemporary South Asia. Finally, it focuses on new areas of inquiry that have been opened up through a focus on gender and the intersections between gender and categories, such as caste, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. This timely study is essential reading for scholars who research and teach on South Asia as well as for scholars in related interdisciplinary fields that focus on women and gender from comparative and transnational perspectives.
Author: Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000688313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Through the analytic of racialization, the chapters in this book argue that social difference in India is reproduced and buttressed through casteist, racist, colonial, and Hindu nationalist projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the chapters look transnationally, examining how regional forms of difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this book attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial and antiracist concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the Indian nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. This book is a significant new contribution to addressing fundamental questions of caste, race, and religious politics in India and will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Geography, History and Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Author: Dhaneswar Bhoi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031306554
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
This edited volume brings together a range of scholars to reflect on the varied ways in which caste is manifested and experienced in social life. Each chapter draws on different methods and approaches but all consider lived experiences and experiential narrations. Considering Guru and Sarukkai’s path-breaking work on ‘Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social’ (2019), this volume applies the insights of the theories to multiple settings, issues and communities. Unique to this volume, Brahmin and other dominant castes' experiences are considered, rather than simply focusing on the lives of oppressed castes (Dalits). Analysis of cross-caste friendships or romances and marriages, furthermore, brings out the intimate and ingrained aspects of caste. Taken together, therefore, the contributions in this volume offer rich insights into caste and its consciousness within the framework of everyday experiences.
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.
