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Imagine watching an action film in a small-town cinema hall in Bangladesh, and in between the gun battles and fistfights a short pornographic clip appears. This is known as a cut-piece, a strip of locally made celluloid pornography surreptitiously spliced into the reels of action films in Bangladesh. Exploring the shadowy world of these clips and their place in South Asian film culture, Lotte Hoek builds a rare, detailed portrait of the production, consumption, and cinematic pleasures of stray celluloid. Hoek's innovative ethnography plots the making and reception of Mintu the Murderer (2005, pseud.), a popular, Bangladeshi B-quality action movie and fascinating embodiment of the cut-piece p...
This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Doing Anthropological Research provides a practical toolkit for carrying out research. It works through the process chapter by chapter, from the planning and proposal stage to methodologies, secondary research, ethnographic fieldwork, ethical concerns, and writing strategies. Case study examples are provided throughout to illustrate the particular issues and dilemmas that may be encountered. This handy guide will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students who are studying or intending to use anthropological methods in their research.
This new history of partition and South Asian cinema is narrated through the careers of émigré film personnel, as well as through the distinctive genres and ancillary ventures that accompanied the aftershocks of partition. Moving beyond arguments about social contingency and political intent, the book suggests that the creative energies, production and subsequent circulation of popular cinema can offer fresh insights into partition. Pointing to regional connections across national boundaries, this book asserts that the cinemas of India and Pakistan must be explored in tandem to uncover the legacy of partition for the culture industries of the region, one that is not hewn out of national erasures. The leitmotifs of émigré personnel, gossip and satire in film print culture, the partisan repertoire of a theatre company, the film genres of the Muslim social, romantic comedies and charba (remakes), and the unruly film archives of postcolonial nation–states, when accessed through the lens of a divisive decolonization, reveal the parallaxes and confabulations of the 'national' on both sides.
Anthropologist Megan Moodie examines the Indian state's relationship to 'scheduled tribes', or adivasis - historically oppressed groups that are now entitled to affirmative action quotas in educational and political institutions. Through a deep ethnography of the Dhanka in Jaipur, Moodie brings readers inside the creative imaginative work of these long-marginalised tribal communities.
This book presents a history of AIDS control in Uganda, from the start of the epidemic in the early 1980s up until 2005. Uganda is well known internationally as an AIDS 'success story', both for its bringing down HIV incidence and prevalence over the 1990s, and for its innovative approach to scaling up the provision of antiretroviral therapy.
Questions of the social implications of biotechnology and biological exchange (the extraction of human tissues such as blood, skin and organs for testing, storage and/or distribution for therapeutic or research purposes) have recently been brought strongly to the analytical fore across the social sciences. This book focuses on the variegated biopolitical milieus of this kind of exchange specifically in South Asia. It ranges widely – theoretically, thematically, and regionally – in examining South Asian variants of and engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange: caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan, DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community in south India and ...
"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--
Animal People introduces readers to the professionalized world of animal protection from the perspective of those who consider themselves to be "moderate" activists. Adam Reed explores the interrelationships between moral cause and organizational culture, including the ways in which expert roles such as investigator and lobbyist inform the practice and outlook of animal protection. This book examines not only connections between forms of professionalism and everyday advocacy but also how those working to improve the welfare of animals can come to possess an expertise in public or mainstream ethics. Reed explores these issues through the example of a Scottish-based animal protection organization. Animal People makes a distinctive contribution to anthropological debate and discussion relating to human and nonhuman animal interactions, activism, and the attributions and imperatives of moral action.