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Seminar papers.
This accessible, richly textured ethnography illuminates the cultural shaping of development and modernity in the context of a remarkable Gandhian program for women and girls that, since 1946, has engaged with issues of sustainability, gender equity, and poverty in Himalayan India. It blends memories, stories and historical research to analyze how rural women have drawn inspiration, in sometimes surprising ways, from Gandhi, as they have sought to confront new environmental and social challenges.
An authoritative, topical, and comprehensive reference to the key concepts and most important traditional and contemporary issues in medical sociology. Contains 35 chapters by recognized experts in the field, both established and rising young scholars Covers standard topics in the field as well as new and engaging issues such as bioterrorism, bioethics, and infectious disease Chapters are thematically arranged to cover the major issues of the sub-discipline Global range of contributors and an international perspective
This anthropological study examines the encounter between Western travellers and Tibetan exiles in Bodhanath, on the outskirts of Kathmandu and analyses the importance of Buddhism in discussions of political, cultural and religious identity.
This book is about Madeleine Slade (1892-1982) and Catherine Mary Heilemann (1901-1982), two English associates of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948), known in India as Mira Behn and Sarala Behn. The odysseys of these women present a counternarrative to the forces of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and globalized development. The book examines their extraordinary journey to India to work with Gandhi and their roles in India’s independence movement, their spiritual strivings, their independent work in the Himalayas, and most importantly, their contribution to the evolution of Gandhian philosophy of socio-economic reconstruction and environmental conservation in the present India...
Even childbirth is affected by globalization—and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender—especially maternity—reconfigured as birth is transformed?
Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending anotherÕs internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head offers an entirely fresh perspective that considers how pain may be configured, managed, explained, and even experienced in deeply relational ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pediatric pain clinic in California, Mara Buchbinder explores how clinicians, adolescent patients, and their families make sense of puzzling symptoms and work to alleviate pain. Through careful attention to the language of painÑincluding narratives, conversations, models, and metaphorsÑand detailed analysis of how young pain sufferers make meaning through interactions with others, her book reveals that however private pain may be, making sense of it is profoundly social.
Hariti is the ancient Indian goddess of childbirth and women healers, known at one time throughout South and Southeast Asia from India to Nepal and Bali. Daughters of Hariti looks at her 'daughters' today, female midwives and healers in many different cultures across the region. It also traces the transformation of childbirth in these cultures under the impact of Western biomedical technology, national and international health policies and the wider factors of social and economic change. The authors ask what can be done to improve the high rates of maternal and infant deaths and illnesses still associated with childbirth in most societies in this area and whether the wholesale replacement of indigenous knowledge by Western biomedical technology is necessarily a good thing.
Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism; both backed by the authority of the state and argues that contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It s...
Offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally, by studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. In the Haitian diaspora, as in Haiti itself, the majority of Haitians have long practiced Catholicism or Vodou. However, Protestant forms of Christianity now flourish both in Haiti and beyond. In the Bahamas, where approximately one in five people are now Haitian-born or Haitian-descended, Protestantism has become the majority religion for immigrant Haitians. In My Soul Is in Haiti, Bertin M. Louis, Jr. has combined multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, Haiti, and the Bahamas with a transnational fra...