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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.
Creating Care: Art and Medicine in US Hospitals is an ethnographic study of the creative, expressive, and art-making activities occurring in hospitals across the United States. Marlaine Figueroa Gray explores how art programming intersects with medical care in US hospitals, sharing the insights of those who facilitate, participate, and support these creative activities as well as the objectives, values, and functions of these offerings. Figueroa Gray illustrates how hospital creative arts programs model care that includes both those in need of healing and those who heal.
In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available-but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Rout...
This book is a study of the concepts of endangerment and extinction. Examining interlinking discourses of biological and cultural diversity loss in western and central India, it problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse.
The movement of people from small towns and villages of India to places outside the country raises a number of questions– about the networks that enable their mobility, the aspirations that motivate them, what they give back to their home regions, and how their provincial home worlds engage with and absorb the consequent transnational flows of money, ideas, influence and care. This book analyzes the social consequences of the transmission of migrant resources to provincial places in India. Bringing together case studies from four regions, it demonstrates that these flows are very diverse, are inflected by regional histories of mobility and development, and may reinforce local power structu...
The march towards a ‘new India’ began with its entry onto the global stage as a rising economic power, impelled by liberalization policies and the forces of globalization. The success of India’s information technology (IT) industry symbolizes these larger developments, yet we lack a critical understanding of the wider social and cultural reverberations of this phenomenon. Reengineering India explores India’s post-liberalization transformation through the lens of the software industry. This book views the IT industry as a key site where new identities, aspirations and social imaginaries are being created and circulated. It examines the origins and organization of software capital, the...
Global health governance has been the subject of wide scholarship, more recently brought to the fore by priorities for global health defined by the Sustainable Development Agenda. The health landscape itself has changed dramatically in the last two decades, shaped by cross-border flows of capital, ideas, technology intermediated through the complex interaction between global, national and local actors and institutions. This book analyses the complex terrain of global health governance and local responses to new global forms of integration and fragmentation in India. It unpacks, both conceptually and empirically, local manifestation and translation of global health architecture and regimes an...
The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand ...
The Nagas of Northeast India give great importance to dreams as sources of divine knowledge, especially knowledge about the future. Although British colonialism, Christian missions, and political conflict have resulted in sweeping cultural and political transformations in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, dream sharing and interpretation remain important avenues for negotiating everyday uncertainty and unpredictability. This book explores the relationship between dreams and agency through ethnographic fieldwork among the Angami Nagas. It tackles questions such as: What is dreaming? What does it mean to say ‘I had a dream’? And how do night-time dreams relate to political and social actions i...