Suchergebnisse

This book examines in rich detail the lives, struggles, and strategies of South Asian activists seeking to advance various political, social, and environmental causes. Through a series of case studies from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka on activists' efforts, it elucidates how they mediate between different spheres that are often (and sometimes legally) kept apart: the political and the legal, the economic and the political, the local and the international. The uniqueness of this book lies in its treatment of 'civil society' as a process brought into being by the actions of specific i

This volume, the second in the Governance, Conflict, and Civic Action series, examines civil society in South Asia through case studies of different kinds of ethnic ('communal') activism. With chapters covering Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India (Darjeeling, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Tamil Nadu), it avoids the 'methodological nationalism' so frequent in social science publications on the region. The articles examine Hindu nationalism, Dalit activism in India and Nepal, and the Janajati movement in Nepal, and show how they are animated by common ideals and themes, such as emphasis on the involvemen

MN Srinivas' concept of 'the dominant caste' has rightly been highly influential. The forms that dominance takes have changed a good deal since his day, but inequality and hierarchy have persisted. Modern ideological justifications of dominance are frequently at variance with those of former times, leading to plenty of paradoxes. These paradoxes are illustrated with examples from Nepal, but their application is much wider. Thanks to Nepal's different political history, the Nepali case can very usefully be contrasted with India and other parts of South Asia to highlight how, and in which contexts, hierarchy as a value persists even when equality is written into numerous constitutional provisions and laws.

AbstractAnthropologists have spilt much ink deconstructing concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. Religion, possibly the most misleading such concept, has proved highly resistant to the acid of cross‐cultural comparison. Debates about the nature of religion go back to sociocultural anthropology's beginnings as a discipline and beyond. Proposed definitions have been numerous, but none has come close to universal acceptance, mainly because conventional definitions are secularized versions of Abrahamic, and especially Protestant, positions and reproduce their essentialism and intellectualism. I argue that by looking closely at the way religious phenomena are conceptualized in South Asia, and especially at how distinct types of religion are practised in characteristically different spaces, a fresh take on the subject is possible. Religion as practised is not one thing but at least three distinct activities and should be conceptualized as such. But, if that is so, how and why is the totalizing conventional view still so pervasive and so powerful? Seeking the answer to that question takes us back to the constitution of modernity and the relationship of religion to the nation‐state. The way forward is to contest the way in which religion has become the last bastion of pure essentialism.

AbstractThis article discusses the changes that activists have brought to Nepali society in relation to two key elements of Bruno Latour's actor‐network theory (ANT): (1) its account of modernity and (2) its radical downplaying of human agency. ANT, contrary to the way it tends to be understood, deserves to be seen, at least in Latour's treatment, as a major theory of modernity. As such, it is important and enlightening, even though its attack on human agency – at least when discussing activism – is unhelpful. On this point Ian Hacking's notion of 'making up people' provides a better guide. The main example explored is the new kinds of ethnic identity that have achieved state recognition and become politically influential in Nepal over the last thirty years. The case of one ethnic and religious activist, Dr Keshabman Shakya, is used to illustrate the argument. Based on notions of human rights, rather similar processes of 'making up people' have also occurred with other minority groups, most strikingly in the case of the 'third gender', a context in which Nepal is famously 'progressive' compared to other nation‐states in the region.

In reflecting on the contributions to this collection, the afterword outlines three ways of understanding violence—direct physical force, structural violence and cultural or symbolic violence—and relates these to Steven Lukes' three faces of power. It revisits Weber's definition of the modern state as claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of the first kind of violence, and contrasts that with the ways in which the actual practice of South Asian politics implies or requires violence. The example of state and non-state violence in Nepal in 2015 is used to illustrate these themes. This example brings out, as several contributions do, the importance of borders as violence-provoking sites of state sensitivity.