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Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep
immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological
challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those
challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a
special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a
very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social
contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview
is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which
personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and
interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity,
therefore-true to the persons involved and true to their moment of
interaction-whilst at the same time providing information on human
capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular
social and cultural contexts.
Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep
immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological
challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those
challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a
special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a
very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social
contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview
is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which
personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and
interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity,
therefore-true to the persons involved and true to their moment of
interaction-whilst at the same time providing information on human
capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular
social and cultural contexts.
Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of
interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a
Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in
the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being
diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of
Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station
porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost
fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the
pleasures to be had in Bombay s red light district. But for all the
joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das s story
unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship.
Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are
often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion
and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life
history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways
conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is
to be an Indian in contemporary India."
Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners-they are people
living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely
misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses.
In Livelihood on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners
engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic
research to cut through the conventional narratives that
romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go
beyond the trendy "sustainable livelihoods" approach to development
to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually
wield over their own lives and the broader socio-political
constraints that persistently push them to the margins. Making
these multi-level connections across a wide range of world regions
and situations, this volume shows how the micro-concerns of
ordinary people might usefully guide the macro-concerns of
governments, NGOs, and global institutions who are engineering
large-scale social and economic development programs. Livelihood at
the Margins is an engaging and eye-opening read for undergraduate
and graduate students studying development in anthropology,
sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines, as well as
a useful tool for developments studies researchers and
practitioners.
Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners-they are people
living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely
misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses.
In Livelihood on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners
engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic
research to cut through the conventional narratives that
romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go
beyond the trendy "sustainable livelihoods" approach to development
to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually
wield over their own lives and the broader socio-political
constraints that persistently push them to the margins. Making
these multi-level connections across a wide range of world regions
and situations, this volume shows how the micro-concerns of
ordinary people might usefully guide the macro-concerns of
governments, NGOs, and global institutions who are engineering
large-scale social and economic development programs. Livelihood at
the Margins is an engaging and eye-opening read for undergraduate
and graduate students studying development in anthropology,
sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines, as well as
a useful tool for developments studies researchers and
practitioners.
Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian
society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred
taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to
cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism
has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and
Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while
Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow.
Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles
and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between
rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary
opposition. Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots,
vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond
immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing on decades of
ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how
cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters
navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred
Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of
the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of
food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of
what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century.
Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian
society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred
taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to
cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism
has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and
Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while
Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow.
Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles
and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between
rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary
opposition. Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots,
vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond
immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing on decades of
ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how
cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters
navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred
Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of
the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of
food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of
what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century.
This book is an edited volume based on selected papers from a
two-day interdisciplinary and multi-regional conference held at
SOAS in July 2004. Taken individually, each of the chapters offer
fine-grained ethnographic analyses of the varying contexts in which
particular marginalised groups - such as Bangladeshi street
children, Ugandan drug dealers and migrant European sex workers -
make a living on the social boundaries of different urban
environments across the globe. Taken together, the contributions
serve to unpack taken-for-granted understandings of terms like
marginality, poverty and deprivation, while offering more nuanced
ways of interpreting people's strategies for survival than
mainstream economic analyses generally allow. Refusing to
pathologise the marginal, the authors collectively demonstrate how
the practices they describe - from casual labouring to begging -
are embedded both within the broader contexts of global capitalism
and within the very specific circumstances in which they occur.
This is reflected in the ordering of the chapters, which aim to
take the reader on an informative journey that shifts back and
forth from the micro to the macro, encountering broader discussion
of salient social scientific concerns along the way. The tensions
between explanatory models that favour agency over structure and
how we might overcome those tensions, for example, are innovatively
dealt with in several chapters, and a number of them address issues
of social exclusion; everyday survival-strategies; and the
implications of livelihoods at the margins for NGO action and
Government policy. Contributors are drawn from anthropology,
development studies and cultural studies backgrounds, and between
them their research for this collection spans eight countries
across four continents.
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