Sumanta Banerjee Marx adda
In one part of the recently translated Spooky Encounters, Sumanta Banerjee chats with the picnicking ghostly Marx and Engels about Indian food in London: “‘Fish-and-chips has almost disapp…
Tag: India
The Fantasist of Calcutta has a plaque
Atrocities and alibi’s for dirty colonial deeds of the ‘robber baron’ Clive and his mates. Here is a plaque for John Zephania Holwell, who wrote his dramatically claustrophobic…
Single Shot: Tractors on Kochi Beach
I was used to seeing the sand coated in washed up Styrofoam, thongs, coconut shells, and water hyacinth. However, on this day I was greeted with tractors, preparing…
Fluid Masculinity: The case of Krishna
As Rama becomes more and more the icon of “virile Hinduism” and the symbol of a new kind of hegemonic, patriarchal, masculinity, so Krishna is held up as…
Great new book from Karine Gagné: Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas
This is a great looking new title from Karine Gagné at the University of Guelph. Available here from University of Washington Press, where the blurb below is also…
Description/Classification/Threshold: Experiments with Renewable Energy Taxonomy
This is not renewable energy: Nor is this some clever, Magritte-esque meta-commentary on how it is impossible represent or think about renewable energy separate from the technologies…
“Cross-Disability” by Michele Friedner
We are interested in the ways that the concept of “cross-disability” has become an unquestioned value and goal in development and advocacy work: organizations, programs, and advocacy efforts…
Slum tourism
I am gathering material for a review of this area and found a dissertation that discusses The Rumour of Calcutta: “Hutnyk (1996: 10) also states that the massive…
Book Review: Stepping into the Elite: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France and the United States by Jules Naudet
In Stepping into the Elite: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France and the United States, Jules Naudet draws on interviews with individuals in these three nations to…
Liminality: Unfixed Culture, Unfixed Selves
by Gertrude Lamare It was June of 2015, and we were on the road, travelling down to Umwang village in Assam, to witness the completion of a much-delayed…
The museum of vernacular regeneration
Read it here
Thesis Review and Interview: Deorukhe Women’s Agency in the Making of Bodies, Cuisine, and Culture in Maharashtra, India
Photograph: Gauri A. Pitale – Waterlogged rice fields of rural Konkan, Maharashtra Please note: As Associate Editor, I am soliciting reviews of recent dissertations in the Anthropology of Food….
Marx in Calcutta, 2018, CITY, Vol 22 (4); 490-509.
Marx in CalcuttaCITY2018 Just click on the page to read the whole thing.
Book Review: Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste by Diane Coffey and Dean Spears
In Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste, authors Diane Coffey and Dean Spears propose that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious goal to introduce toilets…
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…
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,…