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Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don strī-vēṣam (woman's guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. According to the hagiography of Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi dance, every brahmin man from a hereditary Kuchipudi family must don strī-vēṣam at least once in his life, a prescription that still resonates in the village today. Impersonation, the term used to indicate the donning of gender guise (vēṣam), is not simply a performative mandate for Kuchipudi brahmin men but also a practice of power that creates normative ideals of brahmin masculinity in village performance and everyday life. However, the construction of brahmin masculinity against the backdrop of impersonation is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian "classical" dance tradition. By shifting from village to urban and transnational spaces, the book traces the technologies of normativity that create, sustain, and undermine normative ideals of gender, caste, and sexuality through the embodied practice of impersonation in contemporary South India.

AbstractPolice impostors are not only undermining the performance of the Nigeria Police Force, but they are also impinging on the image of the organization. In view of this, this article examined the situational and contextual factors sustaining police impersonation in Nigeria. Situational choice theory was employed as conceptual framework. The existence of six major conditions in Nigeria is encouraging criminally-minded individuals to illegally take-up police identity. Police impersonation is inhibiting the service delivery capacity of the Nigerian police officials in a number of ways. Therefore, it becomes highly imperative for the Nigeria Police Force to design a holistic framework to effectively control the physical and cyber activities of impersonators using police identity to perpetrate different forms of crime.

Impersonation is a criminal act; it constitutes invasion and, in some cases, fraud. Although often associated with the term "identity theft," impersonation is primarily a violation of the rights of the recipient of the communication, rather than that of the person being impersonated, whose rights are only sometimes violated. The present paper is devoted to defending this position. It attempts to overcome the objection that there is no violence necessarily connected to this act, or that the violence is directed toward the person being impersonated instead of the recipient of the impersonating message.

Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don strī-vēṣam (woman's guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. According to the hagiography of Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi dance, every brahmin man from a hereditary Kuchipudi family must don strī-vēṣam at least once in his life, a prescription that still resonates in the village today. Impersonation, the term used to indicate the donning of gender guise (vēṣam), is not simply a performative mandate for Kuchipudi brahmin men but also a practice of power that creates normative ideals of brahmin masculinity in village performance and everyday life. However, the construction of brahmin masculinity against the backdrop of impersonation is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian "classical" dance tradition. By shifting from village to urban and transnational spaces, the book traces the technologies of normativity that create, sustain, and undermine normative ideals of gender, caste, and sexuality through the embodied practice of impersonation in contemporary South India.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction -- 1. Taking Center Stage: The Poet-Saint and the Impersonator of Kuchipudi Dance History -- 2. "I am Satyabhama": Constructing Hegemonic Brahmin Masculinity in the Kuchipudi Village -- 3. Constructing Artifice, Interrogating Impersonation: Madhavi as Vidūṣaka in Village Bhāmākalāpam Performance -- 4. Bhāmākalāpam beyond the Village: Transgressing Norms of Gender and Sexuality in Urban and Transnational Kuchipudi Dance -- 5. Longing to Dance: Stories of Kuchipudi Brahmin Women -- Conclusion: Rewriting the Script for Kuchipudi Dance -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index