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This remarkable book, based on Atreyee Sen's immersion into the low-income, working-class slums of Bombay, tells the story of the women and children of the Shiv Sena, one of the most radical and violent of the Hindu nationalist parties that dominated Indian politics throughout the 1990s and into the present. The Sena women's front has been instrumental in creating and sustaining communal violence, directed primarily against their Muslim neighbours. The author presents the Sena women's own rationale for organising themselves along paramilitary lines, as poor women and children have used violence and 'gang-ism' to create a distinctive social identity, networks of material support, and protection from male violence in the explosive environment of the slums.
Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.
This engaging book, based on Atreyee Sen's immersion into the low-income, working-class slums of Bombay, tells the story of the women and children of the Shiv Sena, one of the most radical and violent of the Hindu nationalist parties that dominated Indian politics throughout the 90s and into the present. The Sena women's front has been instrumental in creating and sustaining communal violence, directed primarily against their Muslim neighbors. The author presents the Sena women's own rationale for organizing themselves along paramilitary lines, as poor women and children have used violence and "gang-ism" to create a distinctive social identity, networks of material support, and protection from male violence in the explosive environment of the slums. Sen's moving account foregrounds the ethical dilemmas that surrounded her "covert" research and writing of the book, and she considers wider questions involving women, violence, and religious fundamentalism.
This book examines how narratives of communal conflicts in south India affect Muslims, women, and the lower castes, entrenching complex realities of marginalisation and violence. Through extensive empirical research, it traces a thread connecting the history of communalism in the south Indian city of Hyderabad with the reality of everyday life in so-called “riot-prone” neighbourhoods. The chapters move between political discourse and daily life, bringing attention to how minority voices navigate and mould the space of interfaith relations and community belonging, and emphasising their political significance within a context dominated by narratives of communal conflicts. The book concludes with a reflection on the entanglements of dominant conflict paradigms and the lived experience of marginality across multiple axes of difference, positioning this interplay as crucial for understanding the multiple dimensions of political violence in contemporary societies. This book will be of much interest to students of feminist peace research, political violence, Asian studies, and International Relations.
About the Book MICHIEL BAAS BRINGS ALIVE A WORLD OF MEN SCULPTING BODIES, REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AND CONFRONTING THEIR VULNERABILITIES IN THE GYMS OF URBAN INDIA. The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions also hold the promise of upward mobility for the personal trainers who work there. By improving their English, 'upgrading' their dressing style and developing a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers, they strategise to climb the middle-class ladder. Their lean, muscular bodies—which Bollywood has set the tone for are crucial to this. Diverging from an older masculine ideal r...
Hindu nationalism is transforming India, as an increasingly dominant ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with sections of India's vast diaspora drawn to, or actively supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a new dynamic--diasporic Hindutva ('Hindu-ness') has grown over many decades. This book explores how and why the movement became popular among India's diaspora from the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology, and its plethora of organisations, have a distinctive resonance and way of operating overseas; the movement and its ideas...
This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interest...
All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. This volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. It takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared. The combination of disappearance through political violence, crime, voluntary disappearance and migration make this book a unique combination.
The focus of this book is the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), within the larger context of contemporary Indian women's movements. AIDWA is assessed and analyzed as a left-oriented, party-affiliated, all-India women's organization. An examination of its administrative structure provides a basis from which to compare the various state-level approaches to activism. The book sheds light on the ongoing theoretical debates of Marxism and feminism and their compatibilities in their Indian-specific circumstances. Investigating the first 25 years of AIDWA's existence (1981-2006), the book looks at the explicit relationship between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and AIDWA, and how both cooperate and define each other. (Series: Gender Discussion / Gender-Diskussion - Vol. 25) [Subject: Sociology, Politics, Women's Studies, Feminism, India Studies, History]
In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.