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For over 40 years, Professor Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita in Sociology, University of Edinburgh, carried out pioneering research, individually and in partnership with her colleagues. The range of subjects she covered includes gender and development, especially childbearing, women’s reproductive rights, social demography in South Asia, Indian society, gender and communal politics, education and the reproduction of inequality; race and ethnicity. Her books, including Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (1979) and Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism, Politicized Religion and the State in South Asia (edited with Amrita Basu, 1998) inspired peers and future scholars alike. In this volume, we bring together a range of new research that is inspired by and intersects with Professor Jeffery’s work. The chapters offer new data, refreshing insights and original analysis on subjects of contemporary importance in the fields of gender, health, marginalization and development.
Appropriating Gender explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes of religious nationalists, they have also asserted their gender, class, caste, and religious identities; contrary to the hopes of nation states, they have often challenged state policies and practices. Through a comparative South Asia perspective, Appropriating Gender explores the varied meanings and expressions of gender identity through time, by location, and according to political context. The first work to focus on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, Appropriating Gender is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies.
This unique and groundbreaking book seeks to re-focus gender debate onto the issue of daughter discrimination - a phenomenon still hidden and unacknowledged across the world. It asks the controversial question of why millions of girls do not appear to be surviving to adulthood in contemporary Asia. In the first major study available of this emotive and sensitive issue, Elisabeth Croll investigates the extent of discrimination against female children in Asia and shifts the focus of attention firmly from son-preference to daughter-discrimination. This book brings together demographic data and anthropological field studies to reveal the multiple ways in which girls are disadvantaged, from excessive child mortality to the withholding of health care and education on the basis of gender. Focusing especially on China and India, the book reveals the surprising coincidence of increasing daughter discrimination with rising economic development, declining fertility and the generally improved status of women in East and South Asia. Essential reading for all those interested in gender in contemporary society.
As a consequence of the politicization of religion in India, the study of Islam in fertility is a highly sensitive issue. How do Muslim women make decisions relating to their fertility and practice of contraception? How do factors as socio-cultural norms, socioeconomic constraints, national family planning policies, and Islamic legal tenets affect women's reproductive health behavior? This ethnographic study answers these questions by analyzing the local context, in which the lives of these low-income Muslim women are embedded. Theories and concepts of demography are also explored and critically reflected on.
The book draws especially on research conducted in the villages of Nangal [Bijnor District] and Qaziwala ... a Muslim-dominated village closer to Bijnor town - Provided by publisher.
This volume is the first to bring together analysis of contemporary female religious leadership in ideologically-diverse Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with chapters discussing the emergence, consolidation, and impact of female Islamic authority.
What do people make of their own development? In Educating Activists, Rebecca M. Klenk illuminates a reality that is far more complex than either development planners or critics commonly assume. This gracefully written, accessible ethnography shows how rural women accept, refuse, reinterpret, and negotiate development's terms in a quest to improve their own communities. Klenk offers an account of Lakshmi Ashram, a remarkable Gandhian educational initiative for women and girls in Himalayan India. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Educating Activists blends memories and stories with historical research and richly detailed ethnographic analysis to craft a compelling portrait of how women across two generations have engaged with issues of sustainability, poverty, gender equity, autonomy, and progress.
A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.
Study conducted in Bijnaur, Uttar Pradesh, India.
The designation "Lord Who Is Half Woman" refers to the androgynous Hindu god Ardhanarisvara (also known as Siva-Sakti). While iconographical aspects of this significant image have been addressed, the complex theological, philosophical, and social implications inherent in a dual gendered deity have not. This book provides the first extensive study of the influence of Ardhanarisvara, exploring four distinct areas of Indian culture, namely iconography, hatha yoga, devotional poetry (bhakti), and mythology. Ellen Goldberg also offers a feminist analysis of the ways in which "male" and "female" have been constructed in this image and the various representations pertaining to the broader gender implications of an androgynous deity.