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Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation’s suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.
India is emerging as a key player in the development cooperation arena, not only because of the increasing volume and reach of its south-south cooperation but more so because of its leadership and advocacy for the development of a distinctly southern development discourse and knowledge generation. This book traces and analyses the evolution of Indian development cooperation. It highlights its significance both to global development and as an effective tool of Indian foreign policy. Focussing on how India has played an important role in supporting development efforts of partner countries in South Asia and beyond through its various initiatives in the realm of development cooperation, the book...
Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection is that suicide should not be understood as a separate realm of pathological behavior but as a form of human action. As such it is always dependent on the decision that the individual makes in a cultural, ethical and socio-economic context, but the context never completely determines the decision. This book also argues that cultural narratives concerning suicide have a problematic double function: in addition to enabling the community to make sense of self-inflicted death, they also constitute a blueprint depicting suicide as a solution to common human problems.
Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) has become a growing force over the past three decades, with Pakistan being one of the IBF pioneers by converting to an ‘interest-free’ banking system in 1985. However, since independence in 1947, there has been continual tension over Pakistan’s essential character, between Islamic Minimalists, who favour a Modernist interpretation of Islam, and those who favour an Islamic Maximalist interpretation that sees Pakistan as a model Islamic state. This book analyses the push to Islamize Pakistan and its financial system by Islamic revivalists, following the early 1947 debates in the original Constituent Assembly to the final 2002 ruling on IBF of the Sharia...
Over the past twenty years, wealthy individuals and private corporations have become increasingly involved in philanthropy, often by establishing foundations targeted at helping to reduce poverty, disease, and other social problems. But as the essays in this interdisciplinary volume show, this new philanthropy does not provide a long-term solution, because it fails to tackle social injustice or the structural reasons for inequality. Placing this discussion in a global context, this far-reaching book questions the political and ideological reasons why rich individuals and companies engage in poverty reduction through philanthropy and suggests that the new philanthropy and social justice debate extends far beyond national boundaries.
Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era. Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.
In recent social research, ethnicity has mostly been used as an explanatory variable. It was only after it was agreed that ethnicity, in itself, is subject to change, were the questions of how and why it changes, possible to answer. This multiplicity of ethnic identities requires that we think of each society as one with multiple ethnic dimensions, of which any can become activated in the process of political competition - and sometimes several of them within a short period of time. Focusing on Malaysia and Indonesia, this book traces the variations of ethnic identity by looking at electoral strategies in two sub-national units. It shows that ethnic identities are subject to change - induced...
"With fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, eloquently showing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning. Her studies illustrate the shaping of human reality and subjectivity in light of extreme psychological suffering, and shed light on psycho-political processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as non-human or less than fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to empathically engage the experience of persons living with condit...
This book presents an examination of fictional representations, in books and films, of the 1947 Partition that led to the creation of the sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan. While the process of representing the Partition experience through words and images began in the late 1940s, it is only in the last few decades that literary critics and film scholars have begun to analyse the work. The emerging critical scholarship on the Partition and its aftermath has deepened our understanding of the relationship between historical trauma, collective memory, and cultural processes, and this book provides critical readings of literary and cinematic texts on the impact of the Partition both ...