Suchergebnisse

This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy-affected people in south India, explores the contrasting ways in which ideas about social completeness might be invoked in different contexts. Following an overview of how notions of 'personhood' and 'adulthood' in India have thus far been theorised, I go on to examine how my informants managed to construct their identities as 'children' in relation to foreign donors, without simultaneously surrendering claims to adult status. Since relationships with various categories of outsiders were only one set of routes through which my informants constituted themselves, the second half of the article focuses on the generational demarcations between the leprosy-affected people who founded the community, and their healthy sons. Ethnographic examples illustrate how there are different ways of becoming a man and an adult, but also that these different ways draw on shared Indian idioms of what it is to be a complete person.

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool‐box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy‐affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts – at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra – I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts