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Tamil Brahmans
The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movemen...
The Caste of Merit
How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India. Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege...
Gender, Caste, and Class in South India's Technical Institutions
With a wide arc encompassing the institutional big men, who run technical institutes and colleges, and the micro-politics of friendships and relationships, this book is a deep dive into the world of Indian engineering colleges. It juxtaposes the stark realities and lived experiences of students against the global sensibilities and standards to which such institutes lay claim. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Tamil Nadu witnessed a record rise in the number of private engineering colleges. However, despite the manifold increase in the number of institutions and consequently, first-generation learners, hierarchies and inequalities continue to be reproduced in these almost temple-like institu...
Oxford Handbook of Caste
The Oxford Handbook of Caste brings together a wide range of essays encompassing various academic disciplines to lay the foundations for a new understanding of caste, capturing emerging research trends, imaginations, and the lived realities of caste.
Everyday Life in South Asia
Now updated: An “eminently readable, highly engaging” anthology about the lives of ordinary citizens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Margaret Mills, Ohio State University). For the second edition of this popular textbook, readings have been updated and new essays added. The result is a timely collection that explores key themes in understanding the region, including gender, caste, class, religion, globalization, economic liberalization, nationalism, and emerging modernities. New readings focus attention on the experiences of the middle classes, migrant workers, and IT professionals, and on media, consumerism, and youth culture. Clear and engaging writing makes this text particularly valuable for general and student readers, while the range of new and classic scholarship provides a useful resource for specialists.
A Companion to the Anthropology of India
A Companion to the Anthropology of India offers a broad overview of the rapidly evolving scholarship on Indian society from the earliest area studies to views of India’s globalization in the twenty-first century. Provides readers with an important new introduction to the anthropology of India Explores the larger global issues that have transformed India since the end of colonization, including demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, and religious issues Contributions by leading experts present up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of key topics such as population and life expectancy, civil society, social-moral relationships, caste and communalism, youth and consumerism, the new urban middle class, environment and health, tourism, public and religious cultures, politics and law Represents an authoritative guide for professional social and cultural anthropologists, and South Asian specialists, and an accessible reference work for students engaged in the analysis of India’s modern transformation
Honeymoon Couples and Jurassic Babies
Honeymoon Couples and Jurassic Babies is the first in-depth study of Sabha Theater, a type of Tamil-language popular theater that started in Chennai (Madras) in the period following India's independence, thriving especially between 1965 and 1985. Breaking new ground in the study of stage and performance, this interdisciplinary book presents a complex view of a significant genre, using historical research and ethnographic information obtained through interviews with performers, writers, and audience members, as well as observations of rehearsals, performances, and television and film shootings. This careful coverage not only contextualizes Sabha Theatre historically, politically, and aesthetically within the wider history of the Tamil stage and a performance scene that includes classical dance and mass media but also reveals how its plays express a Tamil Brahmin identity that is at once traditional and modern. Analyzing what particular plays mean to the specific, urban, elite Brahmin community that produces and consumes them, Kristen Rudisill examines humor that reveals a complex Brahmin identity and surveys markers of moral superiority.
Becoming Organic
A rich, original study of the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality that challenges assumptions of what organic means Tracing the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality, this book yields new understandings of this fraught concept. Shaila Seshia Galvin examines certified organic agriculture in India's central Himalayas, revealing how organic is less a material property of land or its produce than a quality produced in discursive, regulatory, and affective registers. Becoming Organic is a nuanced account of development practice in rural India, as it has unfolded through complex relationships forged among state authorities, private corporations, and new agrarian intermediaries.
A Tale of Two Cities: The Decline and Fall of the "Ubaya-Vedantins" - An outline of the History of Sri Vaishnavas of Tamil Nadu that was never Written.
This book is an expansive outline of history which, at the same time, is also a very comprehensive history of the Sri Vaishnava community of Tamil Nadu, India. It spans a period of 1000 years — from the 11th century CE to the present day. It is The historical narrative is woven around a “tale of two cities” i.e. Sri Rangam and Kanchipuram, the two towns in South India from where a titanic struggle for ownership, power, legitimacy and control over not only temples but also for the very self-identity of the Sri Vaishnava identity was waged for over seven centuries by two major sects, the Tenkalais and Vadakalais. The struggle continues to this day, having been dragged deeply into and getting increasingly embroiled in the larger issues and dynamics of the Tamil State socio-politics viz. language, ethnology, demography and culture. The “tale of two cities” is a historical narrative about grievous loss of religious legacy, debility of cultural identity and decline of economic prosperity arising from social alienation… This book is an absorbing tale of human frailties.... of ambition, greed, deceit, envy, malice and betrayal.
Unnatural Selection
Unnatural Selection is the first book to examine the rise of the "technocentric being"—or geek—who personifies a distinct new phase in human evolution. People considered geeks often have behavioral or genetic traits that were previously considered detrimental. But the new environment of the Anthropocene period—the Age of Man—has created a kind of digital greenhouse that actually favors their traits, enabling many non-neurotypical people to bloom. They resonate with the technological Zeitgeist in a way that turns their weaknesses into strengths. Think of Mark Zuckerberg versus the towering, Olympics-bound Winklevoss twins in the movie Social Network. Roeder suggests that the rise of t...
