Search results

Despite the impressive growth of the Indian economy over the past decades, the country struggles to deal with multiple and overlapping forms of inequality. One of the Indian government's main policy responses to this situation has been an increasing engagement with the 'rights regime', witnessed by the formulation of a plethora of rights-based laws as policy instruments. Important among these are the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). Grounded in ethnographic research in Rajasthan focused on the management of maternal and child health under NRHM, this paper demonstrates how women, as mothers and health workers, organise themselves in relation to rights and identities. I argue that the rights of citizenship are not solely contingent upon the existence of legally guaranteed rights but also significantly on the social conditions that make their effective exercise possible. This implies that while citizenship is in one sense a membership status that entails a package of rights, duties, and obligations as well as equality, justice, and autonomy, its development and nature can only be understood through a careful consideration and analysis of contextually specific social conditions.

Intro -- Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Preface -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Sociality as Figure -- Chapter 3. Fighting Hierarchy -- Chapter 4. Landscapes of Sociality -- Chapter 5. Disentangling the Butubutu of New Georgia -- Chapter 6. Pathway and Side -- Chapter 7. Making Sides -- Chapter 8. 'The Other Kind' -- Chapter 9. 'Maori are Different, but We are Similar for Particular Reasons' -- Chapter 10. Epilogue -- List of Contributors -- Index.

In anthropology, theoretical approaches attempting to come to terms with experiences of social interaction, often inspired by phenomenology, have come to the fore in opposition to the previously favored emphasis on symbolic and social structures. These essays attempt a new kind of ethnographic description of social life that treats structure and practice as aspects of the same reality. This is achieved through attention to indigenous conceptualizations of the way society itself is generated. With Jonathan Friedman and Fredrik Barth providing overviews, this series of innovative ethnographies highlights ways of forming social relations specific to Oceania as a cultural area, exemplifying a new kind of comparative approach and making a major contribution to general social theory