Red tape: bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India
In: ProQuest Ebook Central
In: A John Hope Franklin Center Book Ser.
In: A John Hope Franklin Center book
In: e-Duke books scholarly collection
33 Ergebnisse
Sortierung:
In: ProQuest Ebook Central
In: A John Hope Franklin Center Book Ser.
In: A John Hope Franklin Center book
In: e-Duke books scholarly collection
In: Modern Asian studies, Band 51, Heft 6, S. 1862-1890
ISSN: 1469-8099
AbstractThis article has four important goals. First, I want to ask why liberalization and market-friendly reforms failed to curb corruption in India. Indeed, confounding the predictions of most proponents of reform, corruption seems to have increased after the neoliberal reforms of 1991. Second, I aim to develop a typology in which the importance of particular sectors to corrupt practices is highlighted and explained. Third, I point out that India has failed to make the 'transition' historically seen in low-income countries as they develop. Nation-states have in the past moved from a system of vertical corruption—marked by the extraction of small sums from a large number of transactions with citizens in everyday life—to a system of horizontal corruption, in which governmental elites extract large sums in a small number of transactions from corporate and commercial bodies. Finally, I argue that anti-corruption movements cannot be understood without paying attention to the affective and emotional ties that bind citizens to the state. We have to take account of contradictory feelings about the state: cynicism about the state and popular anger against corruption on one side, and an attachment to popular sovereignty and patronage on the other. These contradictory sentiments will better enable us to understand the conjunctures that lead to effective institutional change.
In: Economy and society, Band 42, Heft 4, S. 686-692
ISSN: 1469-5766
Red Tape presents a major new theory of the state developed by the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence. Every year this violence kills between two and three million people, especially women and girls, and lower-caste and indigenous peoples. Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project. Nor is the state indifferent to the plight of the poor; it sponsors many poverty amelioration programs. Gupta conducted ethnographic research among officials charged with coordinating development programs in rural Uttar Pradesh. Drawing on that research, he offers insightful analyses of corruption; the significance of writing and written records; and governmentality, or the expansion of bureaucracies. Those analyses underlie his argument that care is arbitrary in its consequences, and that arbitrariness is systematically produced by the very mechanisms that are meant to ameliorate social suffering. What must be explained is not only why government programs aimed at providing nutrition, employment, housing, healthcare, and education to poor people do not succeed in their objectives, but also why, when they do succeed, they do so unevenly and erratically.
BASE
In: Transforming cultures eJournal: a journal for the study of cultural and social transformations, Band 3, Heft 2
ISSN: 1833-8542
In this paper, I have tried to reflect on what cosmopolitanism might mean in a very different era of globalisation than the present. Although cosmopolitanism, as an expansive and sociable vision, is often contrasted with the geographically limited perspective and claustrophobic affinities of nationalism, the term originates in a historical period before the rise of nationalism in Europe. I argue that the residents of the civilisations around the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern world were cosmopolitan even by the standards of the high modernist meaning of the term. Not only did a range of people transact and translate across different languages, but they also knew how to conduct themselves in different cultural settings with people of different religious beliefs, while respecting the disparate religious, social, and cultural practices of their neighbours.
In: Ethnos: journal of anthropology, Band 67, Heft 1, S. 33-55
ISSN: 1469-588X
In: Interventions: international journal of postcolonial studies, Band 3, Heft 1, S. 40-46
ISSN: 1469-929X
In: Cultural Critique, Heft 22, S. 187
In: Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Band 4, Heft 2, S. 22-32
ISSN: 1548-226X
In: Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Band 4, Heft 1, S. 1-26
ISSN: 1548-226X
In: A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, S. 267-281
In: Routledge contemporary South Asia series, 31
In: Routledge contemporary South Asia series, 31
"This book assesses the impact of liberalization on practices of government and relations between state and society. It is clear that liberalization as state policy has complex forms of regulation and deregulation inbuilt, and these policies have resulted in dramatic increases in productivity and economic wealth but also generated spectacular new forms of inequality between social groups, regions, and sectors"--Provided by publisher.