Suchergebnisse

Book review of Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302.

In the last few decades, creolisation has become a recurrent feature in the works of scholars from many disciplines, serving as a useful metaphor for understanding contemporary societies in a "world of globalisation". More than a metaphor, creolisation ca.

AbstractAnthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.

This collection examines the concept of human rights in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. The contributors analyze cognitive contexts that produce different meanings of rights, identify spaces of intercultural crossings where differences can coexist, and offer narratives and metaphors to help mediate between distinct cultures.