Search results

Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners-they are people living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses. In Livelihood on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic research to cut through the conventional narratives that romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go beyond the trendy "sustainable livelihoods" approach to development to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually wield over t

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, this article explores the relationship between charity and disability. Despite a stereotype of philanthropic aid as reproductive of existing power structures or symptomatic of state failures to eliminate poverty, closer investigation exposes a more multi-layered picture. Disjunctures in donor and recipient perspectives on charity are shown to create spaces in which recipients might challenge the very characterisations that allow them access to aid in the first place, revealing both the potential and the limitations of charitable aid to bring about social change for disabled people.

AbstractGandhian andHindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theologyper se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications—depending on one's wider social positioning—of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India.

This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up in the South Indian leprosy community where I conducted long-term fieldwork, despite suicide remaining relatively uncommon amongst their leprosy-affected, and often physically disabled, parents and grandparents. Alert to the pitfalls of analytical approaches that either privilege over-arching structural explanations—like those favoured by Durkheim—or, conversely, give too much credence to individual agency and psychology, my analysis here attempts to chart a course through these polarities. It does so by drawing both on Ian Hacking's 'ecological niche' metaphor—to explore how particular configurations of events and circumstances, at different times, might render suicide related behaviour more or less likely among different groups; and on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the 'habitus'—to consider how particular sets of bodily dispositions might generate certain styles of attempted suicide and self-harm.