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Maternities and Modernities
A wide-ranging, comparative study of concepts of motherhood.
Tantric Revisionings
Tantric Revisionings presents stimulating new perspectives on Hindu and Buddhist religion, particularly their Tantric versions, in India, Tibet or in modern Western societies. Geoffrey Samuel adopts an historically and textually informed anthropological approach, seeking to locate and understand religion in its social and cultural context. The question of the relation between 'popular' (folk, domestic, village, 'shamanic') religion and elite (literary, textual, monastic) religion forms a recurring theme through these studies. Six chapters have not been previously published; the previously published studies included are in publications which are difficult to locate outside major specialist libraries.
Genetic Disorders and Islamic Identity Among British Bangladeshis
This book is a study of British Bangladeshi Muslim families and how they experience genetic disorders. A major focus of the research is the ways in which Islam and British Bangladeshi culture affected the families' behaviour. The book provides a revealing perspective on the complexities of life in a diasporic community at a time of considerable tension and conflict. Two key issues are the continuity of Bangladeshi kin networks, restructured within their new transnational context but retaining entrenched attitudes to women, gender and hereditary illness, and the role of Islam and of Muslim identity in a British society increasingly hostile to Muslims and polarised around questions of religion...
Birth and Birthgivers
This volume presents waried essays exploring women's voices, agencies and aesthetics in the traditional handling of chilbearing. Ayurveda as it comprehends reproduction, sohars (birth songs), birth narratives cord-cutters, dais' knowledge and compensation systems, as well as analyses of biomedical dominance and erasure of indigenous knowledge all provide a peek bechind the purdah in this critical reclamation of tradition.
The Politics of Maternity
The evidence surrounding the skills and approaches to support good birth has grown exponentially over the last two decades, but so too have the obstacles facing women and midwives who strive to achieve good birth. This new book critically explores the complex issues surrounding contemporary childbirth practices in a climate which is ever more medicalised amidst greater insecurity at broad social and political levels. The authors offer a rigorous, and thought-provoking, analysis of current clinical, managerial and policy-making environments, and how they have prevented sustaining the kind of progress we need. The Politics of Maternity explores the most hopeful developments such as the abundan...
Prayer in the City
This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban contexts as a window on the diverse ways in which Muslims in different regional and historical settings imagine, experience, and inhabit places and spaces as »sacred«. Unlike most studies on Muslim communities, this volume focuses on cultural, material and sensuous practices and urban everyday experience. Drawing on a range of analytical perspectives, the contributions examine spatial practices in Muslim societies from an interdisciplinary perspective, an approach which has been widely neglected both in Islamic studies and social sciences.
Extremely Violent Societies
In this groundbreaking book Christian Gerlach traces the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. He argues that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities. From killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment he explores what happened before, during, and after periods of widespread bloodshed in countries such as Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nazi-occupied Greece and in anti-guerilla wars worldwide in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, he offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times.
Where There Is No Midwife
In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress.
Trafficking Women in Korea
Based on in-depth ethnographic work, this book presents a study of Filipinas trafficked to South Korea, focusing on women who entered South Korea as migrant entertainers and subsequently became deployed in exploitative work environments around US military bases there. It contributes to the extension of our knowledge about human trafficking in the Asian region through an exploration of the experiences of more than 100 women who took part in the study. The book challenges many of the accepted understandings about "trafficking victims" and unravels the implications of these narrow understandings for the women themselves. It explores the ways women negotiate trafficking largely outside of the emerging formal anti-trafficking framework, and explains how new community formations and social networks emerge crafted by the women themselves to manage and overcome their vulnerabilities in migration.
Women and Sex Work in Cambodia
Prostitution is strongly embedded in local cultural practices in Cambodia. Based on extensive original research, this book explores the nature of prostitution in Cambodia, providing explanations of why the phenomenon is so widely tolerated. It outlines the background of the French colonial period, with its filles malades, considers the contemporary legal framework, and analyses the motivations for sex work, examining in particular how women become locked into debt bondage. Overall the book provides significant contributions to wider debates about sex work, sex trafficking and the constrained nature of women’s choices.
