|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
This book is an ethnographic study of migrants, refugees and
'temporary' people in Malaysia, incorporating narratives, personal
stories, and observations of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur and
Georgetown, Penang. Rather than focusing on specific migrant
communities or refugee 'camps', the book takes subaltern
cosmopolitanism as its central lens to look at how different and
diverse communities of non-citizen 'pendatang' (aliens) co-habit,
work and live together in Malaysia. Urban centers in Malaysia offer
the space for informality that allow stateless and undocumented
people to seek out opportunities, while also finding ways to
assimilate or even 'disappear' into the fabric of society. The book
focuses on the notion of 'contaminations', rather than migration or
migrants, to underscore one of the most important findings of the
ethnographic study - that migrant life in Malaysia is critically
integral, embedded and interwoven into the everyday life in the
city - shaping and affecting all aspects of daily life from
production and supply chains, food service networks, cultural and
religious practices, waste and recycling work, to more intimate and
private contexts such as romantic relationships, family life and
sex-work. Hybridity, inter-mixing and bastardization are part and
parcel of everyday urbanism in KL and Penang - these 'contaminating
elements' challenge and disrupt categories of the 'national' and
categories such as insider/outsider, national purity, and
politically constructed divisions between ethnic and racial groups.
The book thus relies upon detailed ethnographic narratives curated
over a decade of study, offering students interested in fieldwork
research insights into the types of engagements and commitments
necessary for helping build the complex, uneasy and destabilizing
knowledge that characterizes critical ethnography.
This book is an ethnographic study of migrants, refugees and
'temporary' people in Malaysia, incorporating narratives, personal
stories, and observations of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur and
Georgetown, Penang. Rather than focusing on specific migrant
communities or refugee 'camps', the book takes subaltern
cosmopolitanism as its central lens to look at how different and
diverse communities of non-citizen 'pendatang' (aliens) co-habit,
work and live together in Malaysia. Urban centers in Malaysia offer
the space for informality that allow stateless and undocumented
people to seek out opportunities, while also finding ways to
assimilate or even 'disappear' into the fabric of society. The book
focuses on the notion of 'contaminations', rather than migration or
migrants, to underscore one of the most important findings of the
ethnographic study - that migrant life in Malaysia is critically
integral, embedded and interwoven into the everyday life in the
city - shaping and affecting all aspects of daily life from
production and supply chains, food service networks, cultural and
religious practices, waste and recycling work, to more intimate and
private contexts such as romantic relationships, family life and
sex-work. Hybridity, inter-mixing and bastardization are part and
parcel of everyday urbanism in KL and Penang - these 'contaminating
elements' challenge and disrupt categories of the 'national' and
categories such as insider/outsider, national purity, and
politically constructed divisions between ethnic and racial groups.
The book thus relies upon detailed ethnographic narratives curated
over a decade of study, offering students interested in fieldwork
research insights into the types of engagements and commitments
necessary for helping build the complex, uneasy and destabilizing
knowledge that characterizes critical ethnography.
This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on
a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional
ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in
real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited
volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format
wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and
compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow,
in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book.
Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these
authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask
important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write
amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic
crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the
isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe? Such
first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on
by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many,
such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal
injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal
imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating
risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the
biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various
writings-spun from diverse situations and global locations-proceed
within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first
alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various
currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and
connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings
then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the
global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the
promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of
these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as
the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying
times. A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our
lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers
of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary
anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R205
R168
Discovery Miles 1 680
|