You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
By addressing what it means to belong beyond the collective safety net and an emotionally buttressed sense of embeddedness, The Price of Belonging exposes the adverse sides of belonging characterised by obligations, commitments, sacrifices, hidden threats and pressures.
This book explores India’s economic and political relations and defence cooperation with major West European countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom as well as Austria, the Visegrad Four, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the Baltics. It examines the complexity, the elements of convergence and divergence as well as the challenges and prospects of India’s relations with these countries and assesses the diverging EU think tanks’ images of India. It focuses on India’s multi-dimensional relationship with European countries, which are major trading partners, a significant source and destination of foreign direct investment, an important source of technology and best practices. It examines the Narendra Modi government’s policies to re-energise the India-EU matrix and proactively engage Europe and its sub-regions.
Muslims have been shaping the Americas and the Caribbean for more than five hundred years, yet this interplay is frequently overlooked or misconstrued. Brimming with revelations that synthesize area and ethnic studies, Crescent over Another Horizon presents a portrait of Islam’s unity as it evolved through plural formulations of identity, power, and belonging. Offering a Latino American perspective on a wider Islamic world, the editors overturn the conventional perception of Muslim communities in the New World, arguing that their characterization as “minorities” obscures the interplay of ethnicity and religion that continues to foster transnational ties. Bringing together studies of Ib...
Global Indian Diasporas discusses the relationship between South Asian emigrants and their homeland, the reproduction of Indian culture abroad, and the role of the Indian state in reconnecting emigrants to India. Focusing on the limits of the diaspora concept, rather than its possibilities, this volume presents new historical and anthropological research on South Asian emigrants worldwide. From a comparative perspective, examples of South Asian emigrants in Suriname, Mauritius, East Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom are deployed in order to show that in each of these regions there are South Asian emigrants who do not fit into the Indian diaspora concept—raising questions about the effectiveness of the diaspora as an academic and sociological index, and presenting new and controversial insights in diaspora issues.
Food and eating has always been endowed with meanings. It is one of the most visible and important symbols of identity and difference, uniting the members of a community and segregating them from other communities. This inclusion and exclusion can be observed not only in what they eat or what they are known to eat, but also how they eat, how they prepare and serve their food, and what happens after food is taken. The study of food politics and questions of identity and difference can, therefore, be a means of understanding the underlying social relations in any culture and its quiescent philosophy. This ethnographic work discusses the politics inherent in food among the Garos of Assam (India) and Bangladesh. In these two areas, they live as a minority, and with and in the peripheries of a dominant non-Garo culture. Thus, this book examines the ways in which Garos conceptualize themselves and the ‘other’ world through the microcosm of food – the most important need of all. It discusses, among other topics, how the concepts of Garo food versus non-Garo food find fruition in social reality and collective memory, as an identity marker.
This book explores the critical linkages between indigeneity, marginality, and the state in Bangladesh. Indigeneity is progressively gaining currency in politics and thereby becoming an active force in the larger context of national activism with transnational patronage and international support. Drawing on comprehensive and solid ethnographic accounts, the book offers a broader understanding of the process of marginalisation and the emergence of new leadership among the Khumi, an indigenous group of Bangladesh. It illuminates how the Khumi have realised their position on the margin of the state within the socio-economic, political, and ethnic history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It also looks at how kin-based social organisations and non-kin-based social relations become bases of power and authority as well as cooperation and reciprocity in Khumi society. Lucid and topical, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of indigenous studies, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology, political sciences, international relations, border studies, and South Asian studies, especially those concerned with Bangladesh.
Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of Garo hill farmers, and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book reveals the inadequacy of the all too often assumed characterization of upland societies as culturally homogenous, internally cohesive, and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book focuses on a rural area where land constitutes the most important resource, and where a substantial number of people practise traditional Garo animism. The book explores how people create and continually reinterpret the m...
This book traces the self-positioning of Hindostani people in the face of British and Dutch colonial practices. Originally from India and shipped to the Dutch colony of Suriname after the abolition of slavery, the Hindostani served as contract labourers to keep the plantation system afloat from 1873. Central to the book is the perspective of the Hindostani themselves. We travel alongside the Hindostani from the moment they were recruited and their movement through the depots awaiting shipment, their travel experiences, their arrival in Suriname, relocation to plantations, and their dispersal following the end of their contracts, either as city workers, or farmers. All along, the book poses the question of identification: how did Hindostani make sense of themselves, their fellow Hindostani, and Surinamese society? Stereotyped images make way for insight in lived experience of lower and higher caste, Hindus and Muslims, men and women.
How does smallness shape a country and its relations with other countries? In comparative case studies that cover a diverse set of regions, Small Countries describes a number of similar problems with which small countries must cope, on domestic levels as well as in their transnational and global encounters.
Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country. It has more inhabitants than either Russia or Japan, and its national language, Bengali, ranks sixth in the world in terms of native speakers. Founded in 1971, Bangladesh is a relatively young nation, but the Bengal Delta region has been a major part of international life for more than 2,000 years, whether as an important location for trade or through its influence on Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim life. Yet the country rarely figures in global affairs or media, except in stories about floods, poverty, or political turmoil. The Bangladesh Reader does what those portrayals do not: It illuminates the rich historical, cultural, and political ...