Destruction of weavers
Their bones will, Marx says, end up bleached on the plains of Bihar. Here Ranajit Guha in 1956 examines how colonial policy and corporation demands destroy livelihoods and…
Tag: India
Llerena Searle on her new book, Landscapes of Accumulation
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo24117771.html Interview by Liza Youngling Liza Youngling: In Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporar…
History tick tock
A somewhat strange take on the watch mechanism metaphor for history, and on village structure, from K.N.Chaudhuri. Asia Before Europe (explaining Braudel).
Marx on India in 1857
Marx writes to document the outrages committed by the British in retaliation for the uprising in 1857: “The Punjaub is declared to be quiet, but at the same…
Sirpa Tenhunen on her new book, A Village Goes Mobile
h https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-village-goes-mobile-9780190630270 Interview by Ilana Gershon Ilana Gershon: What is so fascinating about A Village Goes Mobile is how effectively you use yo…
Book Review: Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey
In Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, authors Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey offer a compendious account of waste in India, exploring its implication in questions of economic…
Living Fossils
One of the most popular jokes among anthropologists is how often our work is mistaken for palaeontology. Almost every one of my colleagues and even a few of…
Ep. #15 Designing agency: Vijayendra Rao talks development, anthropology, and making social change
Vijayendra Rao, the lead economist at the World Bank in the research department, talks to our own Ian Pollock about the role that anthropology and ethnography could play in helping…
De-centrifuedalised or tropicalization: Marx outside the Euro-American Circuits
So, a bit bemused at the appearance of various Marx readers or ‘companions’ filled with US and UK based scholars, mostly, I thought it worth pointing to a…
Ep. #14 Thesis writing, picturing cults, Muslims with caste, & fieldwork boredom: this month on TFS
Ian (1:25) starts us off by asking, just how well-written does a thesis need to be? “As anthropologists, basically what we do is write… whether it’s writing your field notes,…
The Rumour of Calcutta – digital book
22 years ago my first book was typeset and laid out in the days before electronics – well, an electric typesetting machine was plugged into a wall, but…
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences by Marshall Kramer
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences Projit Bihari Mukharji University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages. In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body,…
Anthrocasts: When communities speak, listen and learn
Online ethnography, where researchers may never share a physical space with the participants in their research, is finding its methodological feet. Combine that with an analysis of these…
Restored 18th century Danish tavern to be inaugurated today
[JH comment: now if you were plying the illicit opium trade on behalf of dodgy East India Company officials, you’d also need to stop by the Tavern and…
Book Review: Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change by Shakuntala Banaji
In Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change, Shakuntala Banaji draws on extensive fieldwork research to offer a rich and textured account of the place of…
DragNet: January 16 – January 31, 2018
Image from projects.bettergov.org DragNet is back, with a recap of a number articles that came up last month in our twitter feed. In World News, we have a…
Ep. #7 The knowledge we value: Dipesh Chakrabarty talks the contentious politics of knowledge production
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the…
Living and F*cking with Acronyms: A response to Dennis Altman’s call to rethink LGBTI
Last week Australian academic Dennis Altman published a provocative piece in The Conversation, suggesting that it was time to re think the label LGBTI. In the place of…
On Madhava Prasad
an overdue appreciation. Read the rest of the review here, or below: In Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India, film studies becomes politics, but also society,…
Ep. #5 Stunted thinking: Annie McCarthy talks slum children, NGOs, and stunting in Delhi
In Ep. #5, Stunted thinking, Annie McCarthy talks slum children, NGOs, and stunting in Delhi, India.
#3 The flies that bind: Assa Doron talks waste in India
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Assa Doron talks about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it–or fail to, plus the…
Danish Tavern Serampore
Danish tavern decked up to start second innings in Serampore Ajanta Chakraborty| TNN | Nov 21, 2017, 04:53 IST KOLKATA: The double-storey Denmark Tavern, which was in a shambles till a…
Nithya Natarajan: Behind the Indian Boom
“Behind the Indian Boom: Inequality and Resistance at the Heart of Economic Growth” is an exhibition curated by Alpa Shah and Simon Chambers, located in the Brunei Gallery…
Do you remember when Australia did this for CHOGM? So its not just a ‘commonwealth’ thing.
Urban beauty. I dunno if I am more disgusted by this event with Ivanka or the WP’ article’s failure to do proper comparative memory work – since I…