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Papers presented at the International Conference on Women and Migration in Asia, held at New Delhi in December 2003.
This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community. It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostitution on the kinship structures and marriage practices of a community. This starkly manifests among the Bedias in the clear separation between sisters and daughters who engage in prostitution and wives and daughters-in-law who do not. The Bedias exemplify a situation in which prostitution of young unmarried women is the mainstay of the familial economy of an entire social group. Tracing the recent origins of the practice in the community, the author goes on to explore the manner in which this familial economy manifests itself in the lives of individual women and the kind of family groupings it produces. She then examines the repercussion this economy has on the lives of Bedia men, how the problem of their marriage is resolved, and how the Bedia wives become repositories of female purity which otherwise stands jeopardized by Bedia sisters engaged in prostitution.
Within the social, political, and economic contexts existing in modern-day India, family is neither a simple remnant of tradition nor a domain merely representing insulated private lives. Rather, it is implicated in malleable yet overpowering structures, relationships, and practices. If the 'family' is a crucial site of ideological and imaginative investments playing a critical role in reproducing and defining contemporary selves and societies, 'families' are responsive to and constrained by the complex dynamics in which they are enmeshed. Family relationships remain fundamental to survival and security even as policy and legislative imperatives as well as reproductive and communication tech...
Family Studies brings together diverse contributions to focus upon issues central to the conceptualization of families and their implications for Indian society.
On May 19, 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks, snipers, and war weapons to disperse the thousands of Red Shirts protesters who had taken over the commercial center of Bangkok to demand democratic elections and an end to inequality. Key to this mobilization were motorcycle taxi drivers, who slowed down, filtered, and severed mobility in the area, claiming a prominent role in national politics and ownership over the city and challenging state hegemony. Four years later, on May 20, 2014, the same army general who directed the dispersal staged a military coup, unopposed by protesters. How could state power have been so fragile and open to challenge in 2010 and yet so seemingly sturdy only ...
Analysis of the women who migrate for sex work, the organizations that facilitate these placements and the hierarchies that persist within the trade, all of which unfold in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
"In the Western popular imagination, there is a singular association between Tantra and sex. But behind sensationalist stories of Tantric lovemaking lies a rich spiritual and textual tradition of which sexual union is only a small, and fiercely debated, part. In The Path of Desire, Hugh B. Urban takes us on an ethnographic journey to Assam, the heartland of Tantric practice in contemporary India, revealing the vibrant, dynamic lived tradition of Hindu Tantra. The Path of Desire expands our definition of kāma, a central concept of Tantra generally translated as "desire," to focus on mundane and worldly desires such as healing and childbearing. This more holistic notion of desire manifests itself in popular folk practice, which Urban categorizes in four forms: institutional Tantra, comprised of gurus, disciples, and esoteric rituals; public Tantra, involving offerings and temple celebrations; folk Tantra, focusing on practices of healing, protection, material wellbeing, and desire fulfillment; and pop Tantra, or how Tantra is portrayed in popular media such as paperbacks, comic books, and movies. The result is a nuanced understanding of Tantra as a diverse lived tradition"--
Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include combinations of quantitative and qualitative analyses, visual sources and in-depth case studies are being tried out and accepted in geography despite its masculine legacy. ...
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Domestic and caregiving work has been at the core of human existence throughout history. Poorly paid or even unpaid, this work has been assigned to women in most societes and occasionally to men often as enslaved, indentures, "adopted" workers. While some use domestic service as training for their own future independent households, others are confined to it for life and try to avoid damage to their identities (Part One). Employment conditions are even worse in colonizer-colonized dichotomies, in which the subalternized have to run the households of administrators who believe they are running an empire (Part Two). Societies and states set the discriminatory rules, those employed develop strat...