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Ganesh is a popular deity all over India, invoked before all Hindu ceremonies as the Lord of Beginnings and Remover of Obstacles (Vighnaharta). His close association with Mumbai is well attested through the Ganapati Utsav, the Ganesh festival, not least because images of his immersion in the sea against a backdrop of skyscrapers have become a visual cliche about the paradox of the modern and the traditional in today's India. But while this form of Ganesh is a temporary visitor to the city, Ganesh as Siddhivinayak has become perhaps the most visible deity in the city with a large new temple built during the period when the name of the city, Bombay, was changed to the local version of the city's name, said to derive from the goddess Mumba Devi. The article looks at a devotional film about Siddhivinayak, produced in cooperation with the shrine, to see how Ganesh is understood today by the way the shrine tells the story of the deity and his devotees.

In 2010, the Indian elephant (elephas maximus indica) was declared a National Heritage Animal, in view of its contribution to Indian culture and history. It is not surprising that the elephant features in Hindi film, but it is striking that it features in a range of genres, including the mythological, the historical, the social film and features in several children's films, a rare genre in Indian cinema. In these films the elephant is shown to have a complex status, being divine, especially in association with the elephant-headed god Ganesha, as a moral and noble animal with human qualities, as well as a working animal participating in warfare and in circuses. The elephant's qualities are often contrasted with those of humans, with the elephant always esteemed for its moral rectitude, its devotion, its dedication and its sense of joy. The elephant has names and characters but it does not appear as an animal outside the realms of humans and anthropomorphic gods (with even Ganesha having a humanlike body). However, although the Hindi film cannot feature the elephant's current status as an endangered species whose only predator is man, it does create an interest and empathy for this symbolically significant animal. This article explores these representations in films, including animated films (My friend Ganesha, 2007), mythological films about Ganesha (Shri Ganesh Mahima, 1950); children's films (Haathi mere saathi, 1971; Safed haathi, 1978); historical films (Mughal-e Azam, 1960; Jodhaa Akbar, 2008), and as a forestry worker (Munimji,1955; Pakeezah, 1971), including in one of the earliest feature films shot in India, which produced India's first international star, Sabu: Elephant boy, 1937.

While Gandhi's image is well known in India and throughout the world, mostly in photographs, chromolithographs, and newsreels, there are surprisingly few Indian films about the father of the nation and his role in the national drama, the historic struggle for independence, perhaps the most important event in twentieth-century India. Gandhi made the freedom struggle a popular movement in part through his manipulation of symbols such as khadi, the spinning wheel, and his dress, yet though a prolific writer, he eschewed the new medium of film for promulgating his message. Gandhi appears frequently in costume dramas and in other genres, but the biopic is largely absent in mainstream cinema. This article looks at the biopic in popular Hindi cinema and at Richard Attenborough's Gandhi to examine what this tells us about the presence and absence of Gandhi in independent India.

Increasing access to diverse types of credit and spreading indebtedness across many social groups were significant economic developments of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, with implications for social inequality and insecurity. This review evaluates the role of credit and debt in social inequality in the United States. Credit and debt shape inequalities along multiple pathways, in defining social inclusion and exclusion, directing life chances, and facilitating oppression. On the basis of this review, I conclude that building on the progress made in prior research calls for a relational approach to understanding credit, debt, and inequality that includes a focus on the powerful actors that benefit from a political economy increasingly dependent on credit and debt to distribute, regulate, and control social resources. I close by identifying outstanding questions that need to be answered in order to move forward our understanding of economic inequality and insecurity, as well as for social policy and the prospects for collective action.

The U.S. job structure became increasingly polarized at the turn of the twenty-first century as high- and low-wage jobs grew strongly and many middle-wage jobs declined. Prior research on the sources of uneven job growth that focuses on technological change and weakening labor market institutions struggles to explain crucial features of job polarization, especially the growth of low-wage jobs and gender and racial differences in job growth. I argue that theories of the rise of care work in the U.S. economy explain key dynamics of job polarization—including robust growth at the bottom of the labor market and gender and racial differences in job growth—better than the alternative theories. By seeing care work as a distinctive form of labor, care work theories highlight different dimensions of economic restructuring than are emphasized in prior research on job polarization. I show that care work jobs contributed significantly and increasingly to job polarization from 1983 to 2007, growing at the top and bottom of the job structure but not at all in the middle. I close by considering whether the care economy will continue to reinforce job polarization, or whether it will provide new opportunities for revived growth in middle-wage jobs.

After decades of rising poverty segregation in American cities, fewer poor people lived in extreme–poverty neighborhoods in 2000 than in 1990. The decline of concentrated poverty in many US metropolitan areas suggests that the poor may have spread out across metropolitan areas and became less spatially isolated in the 1990s. Most research on poverty trends has focused only on local neighborhood circumstances, however, rather than the spatial segregation of the poor in the wider metropolitan context. This paper builds on previous work by evaluating whether declining concentrated poverty brought the poor closer to more advantaged populations. I ask whether the poor became less concentrated over small land areas, less centralized, and less clustered in neighborhoods near other poor neighborhoods compared to more advantaged groups in the 1990s. I find that the poor did deconcentrate spatially in the 1990s, but mainly among other relatively disadvantaged populations. In fact, the poor became more segregated from the affluent in the 1990s on some spatial dimensions. Structural inequalities maintained spatial distance between the most and least advantaged even in a time of declining concentrated poverty.

Rising inequalities and high levels of consumption in many capitalist economies make understanding the relationship between stratification and consumption especially important at the turn of the 21st century. I propose that one way to advance this research is to build on work in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption. This scholarship is often disparaged as positing an overly rational and manipulative consumer actor. I argue instead that the positional consumption literature in the Veblenian tradition offers a more complex view of the consumer actor than typically recognized and in particular allows an important role for habit, routine, and convention in consumer behavior. I identify three major arguments about the influence of habit on positional consumption from work in the Veblenian lineage. I conclude that incorporating this more complex view of emulative consumption produces more satisfying theoretical propositions about the dynamic relationship between consumption levels, the standard of living, and structures of inequality than typically addressed in research on stratification and consumption.