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Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows ...
Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as "India's 9/11" or simply "26/11," the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt "modern" homeland security approaches. S...
"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India. Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects hav...
Forging an anti-imperialist Marxism through dialectical and historical approaches, this volume of Political Power and Social Theory demonstrates how the South Asian facet of this revolutionary tradition can contribute to and even reenergize global Marxist theory.
Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chrono...
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies –such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities.
"Although blasphemy is as old as religion itself, its history has begun a new chapter in recent years. Slanders of the sacred are everywhere, as in the highly visible Charlie Hebdo case, with "religion" sometimes appearing as little more than a membrane for giving and receiving offense. Where some explain the contemporary preoccupation with blasphemy by pointing to the interconnectedness of twenty-first-century media, J. Barton Scott argues that we need to look deeper into the past at the colonial-era infrastructures that continue to shape our globalized world. Slandering the Sacred examines one such powerful and widely influential legal infrastructure: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code....
An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a...
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.
In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiq...