Suchergebnisse

Exploring the intersection of state, religion, and ethnicity, this article considers the opportunities for individual and collective advancement available to Muslim Gujjars in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the lives of three prominent members of the community—a teacher, a political activist, and a maulvi—it considers their respective orientations to the state and their relationships with their fellow Gujjars, to illustrate the different ways in which Gujjars have sought to transcend their marginal and subordinated position as an ethnic and religious minority. With state-promoted schemes of affirmative action and reservation offering only limited opportunities for social and economic advancement, we see how Gujjars have responded to their continued marginalization, first through political mobilization as an ethnic group and, more recently, through the establishment of Islamic educational institutions and association with Tablighi Jama'at. This leads to an evaluation of the emancipatory potentials and contradictions of insurgent citizenship when mobilized around specific aspects of ethnic and religious identity. Against a backdrop of economic liberalization and accompanying shifts in civil society, I show how the distribution of rewards that derive from strategies of assimilation, engagement, and withdrawal are structured in particular ways, including by class and gender.

AbstractExploring the intersection of state, religion, and ethnicity, this article considers the opportunities for individual and collective advancement available to Muslim Gujjars in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the lives of three prominent members of the community—a teacher, a political activist, and a maulvi—it considers their respective orientations to the state and their relationships with their fellow Gujjars, to illustrate the different ways in which Gujjars have sought to transcend their marginal and subordinated position as an ethnic and religious minority. With state-promoted schemes of affirmative action and reservation offering only limited opportunities for social and economic advancement, we see how Gujjars have responded to their continued marginalization, first through political mobilization as an ethnic group and, more recently, through the establishment of Islamic educational institutions and association with Tablighi Jama'at. This leads to an evaluation of the emancipatory potentials and contradictions of insurgent citizenship when mobilized around specific aspects of ethnic and religious identity. Against a backdrop of economic liberalization and accompanying shifts in civil society, I show how the distribution of rewards that derive from strategies of assimilation, engagement, and withdrawal are structured in particular ways, including by class and gender.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of ten years this article details the access arrangements that govern the use of a grazing pasture in Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh, India. Following Ribot and Peluso's (2003) distinction between 'property' and 'access' I explore the area between that which people have property rights to, and that which they are able to extract benefit from. In parallel to this Sikor and Lund (2009) identify a second 'grey zone' existing between authority and power where decisions about how resources are distributed in society are legitimised. Taking as its subject the multiple ways that these two sets of relationships play out, this article considers the everyday politics through which Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar buffalo herders activate and justify their presence on the pasture. Examining the politics of natural resource use in this way brings to the fore inequalities in access and explains the ways in which they occur.

In recent decades international development has grown into a world-shaping industry. But how do aid agencies work and what do they achieve? How does aid appear to the adults and children who receive it? And why has there been so little improvement in the position of the poor? Viewing aid and development from anthropological perspectives gives illuminating answers to questions such as these. This essential textbook reveals anthropologists' often surprising findings and details ethnographic case studies on the cultures of development. The authors use a fertile literature to examine the socio-political organisation of aid communities, agencies and networks, as well as the judgements they make about each other. The everyday practice of development work is about negotiating power and culture, but in vastly different ways in different contexts and for different social groups. Exploring the spaces between policy and practice, success and failure, the future and the past, this book provides a rounded understanding of development work that suggests new moral and political possibilities for an increasingly globalised world.

The socio-economic condition of Scheduled Tribe (ST) groups of India has been a key academic concern since the administrative category was established by Constitutional Order in 1950. This article explores the integration of ST groups into the present-day Indian capitalist economy along with the social and political forces that have shaped this process of inclusion from the colonial period onwards. Specifically, it compares experiences of residual poverty and relational inequality among two groups administratively classified as ST—Gaddi in Himachal Pradesh and Bhils in Maharashtra. Recognising that Gaddi and Bhils remain rooted at the bottom of socio-economic hierarchies we ask why this remains the case despite affirmative action programmes aimed at ensuring ST inclusion in educational institutions, government jobs and elected bodies along with many welfare schemes. Against the backdrop of booming India, the article documents how Bhils and Gaddis struggle to negotiate the obstacles which block paths to economic and social mobility.

This article examines the circumstances in which the tasks performed by professional labour contractors may be passed on to worker-agents. It does so by critically engaging with the experience of migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand as they travel to work in the Peermade tea belt in the South Indian state of Kerala. Specifically, we identify shifts in economic and political contexts that have permitted these functions to pass from labour contractors to workers-agents and from a Sardari (top-down) to a Ristedari (kinship based) system. Outlining the functions of the labour contractor—as bridge, broker and buffer—the article details the complex processes and the series of negotiations that occur during the transition from labour contractor to worker-agent-led recruitment and the implications of this shift for labour relations in the production setting. We conclude by calling for further consideration of the 'worker-agent' as a key emerging figure in understanding the contemporary transformations in the reproduction of footloose migrant labour, which may have larger ramifications for other contexts in South Asia and beyond.

AbstractThis article describes the bureaucratic processes required to establish and manage a single international capacity‐development project that brought together a funding council (AHRC), UK University (SOAS University of London) and universities and other research organisations in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Drawing from ethnographic critiques of the planning and audit practices employed in international development and in the UK University sector, we track the formal certification of partnership as enacted through due diligence and contracts, budgets and timeframes, and reconciliations and reporting. These practices point to pervasive assumptions about capacity transfer and the unequal basis of international research coalitions spanning the Global North and Global South. In this article, we challenge these assumptions by documenting how the allocation of capacity is constrained in hierarchies of time and space. For equitable partnership arrangements to be achieved, we recommend that capacity development be considered a long‐term exchange that flows from mutual reflection and learning from one another.