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Conclusion

Nikita Sud

in Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat

This book has covered critical themes in the life of twentieth-century Gujarat. It has settled on liberalization and Hindu nationalism as significant motifs in the trajectory of the region today. The ... More

This book has covered critical themes in the life of twentieth-century Gujarat. It has settled on liberalization and Hindu nationalism as significant motifs in the trajectory of the region today. The concluding chapter brings together explanations for their convergence. It draws on accounts from the history, politics, economics, sociology and leadership base of Gujarat. These explanations are then placed against national and international developments. Next, the third major theme of this work, that is the state, is considered. Based on the findings of this book and cognate literature, the case for a contemporary reinvention rather than recession of the state is underlined. A final statement considers the place of this dynamic state in the liberal-illiberal conjuncture of our time.Less

Epilogue

Thomas R. Trautmann

in Aryans and British India

This chapter presents additional discussion on the issue of the Aryan idea and the racial theory of the Indian civilization, providing commentaries on the social construction of race, the value of ... More

This chapter presents additional discussion on the issue of the Aryan idea and the racial theory of the Indian civilization, providing commentaries on the social construction of race, the value of the accomplishments of the British Sanskritists, and the impact of new Orientalism on India. It concludes that the political consequences of the Aryan or Indo-European idea do not reside within the idea itself but vary with circumstance, and are the creatures of historical conjuncture and human purpose.Less

Race, Nation, Equality: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and a Genealogy of U.S. Mercantilism

David Kazanjian

in Post-Nationalist American Studies

This chapter introduces Olaudah Equiano and examines the concept of U.S. mercantilism. It begins by suggesting that Equiano's text urges people to consider how mercantilism worked to produce and to ... More

This chapter introduces Olaudah Equiano and examines the concept of U.S. mercantilism. It begins by suggesting that Equiano's text urges people to consider how mercantilism worked to produce and to touch practices and discourses of “nation”, “equality”, and “race” during the late-eighteenth century. This is followed by a discussion on how Karl Marx's theory of value led to a critique of mercantilism's expression of formal and abstract equality with national and racial codification. The chapter then reviews Equiano's text before studying its representation of the expression of formal and abstract equality in the mercantilist conjuncture during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.Less

Transnational Migration Studies

Banu Özkazanç-Pan

in Transnational Migration and the New Subjects of Work: Transmigrants, Hybrids and Cosmopolitans

This chapter outlines the three main concepts that are derived from transnational migration studies. Transnational migration signifies mobility that not only spans geographies but also space and ... More

This chapter outlines the three main concepts that are derived from transnational migration studies. Transnational migration signifies mobility that not only spans geographies but also space and social fields, allowing scholars to account for and understand how (new) forms of identity, belonging, and nationhood materialize. In turn, the ongoing societal changes taking shape by way of transnational migration reflect a new reality and social condition, that of mobility and encounters between/among people across relations of difference that are themselves constantly shifting. To expand on new directions for management scholarship that are possible based on transnational migration studies, this chapter identifies three key concepts: multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism and globalhistorical conjunctures. Each of these concepts are expanded upon in terms of their main points and contributions to thinking about the new social condition of mobility as it relates to theorizing people, difference and work—an endeavour that is the focus of the following three chapters.Less

Down and Out: Immigrant Poverty and Queer Sexuality

Nick Rees-Roberts

in French Queer Cinema

This chapter explores the sexual component of the authoritarian conjuncture in France and its effect on cinematic visions of poverty, marginality, and immigration. It analyses Amal Bedjaoui's Un fils ... More

This chapter explores the sexual component of the authoritarian conjuncture in France and its effect on cinematic visions of poverty, marginality, and immigration. It analyses Amal Bedjaoui's Un fils and Sébastien Lifshitz's Wild Side, two films that weaved poverty and sexuality into the social fabric and took up the social and sexual dynamics of the current retreat into conservatism. These two films also highlighted precarious material lives and increased emotional anxiety for those they figure as excluded from neo-liberal hegemony – migrants, sex workers and transgender communities.Less

Belongings

Joseph Brooker

in Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed: Volume 9

This chapter discusses some representations of nation and ethnicity, beginning with an account of the reactions that surrounded Howard Brenton's play, The Romans in Britain, and then identifies the ... More

This chapter discusses some representations of nation and ethnicity, beginning with an account of the reactions that surrounded Howard Brenton's play, The Romans in Britain, and then identifies the components of the national conjuncture and tries to determine whether a literary work can cover a nation. It also examines other techniques used by writers who wanted to document the condition of England in the 1980s, Black British and Asian fiction and poetry, and writers who self-consciously set themselves outside ethnic groupings.Less

Moving from Present to Future

Andrea Kölbel

Meenakshi Thapan (ed.)

in In Search of a Future: Youth, Aspiration, and Mobility in Nepal

Chapter One locates this research conducted with public university students in Kathmandu within the conceptual debate on the role of youth in processes of social change. In bringing together ... More

Chapter One locates this research conducted with public university students in Kathmandu within the conceptual debate on the role of youth in processes of social change. In bringing together different strands of research on youth, aspiration, and mobility, the chapter identifies important changes in the ways in which social scientists have thought about and, increasingly, have worked with young people in the twentieth and the twenty-first century. The discussion also shows that researchers have approached questions about young people’s agency from a rather narrow angle, as they have primarily studied instances in which young people are involved in acts of resistance or the creation of value, often in response to situations of adversity. Existing theorizations of youth agency, therefore, tend to reproduce rather than scrutinize pervasive visions of youth as agents of change and as a source of hope for a better future. In order to provide a new perspective, the conceptual approach adopted pays close attention to the varied nature of youth agency.Less

Confronting the Present: Students’ Absence from and Presence on Campus

Andrea Kölbel

Meenakshi Thapan (ed.)

in In Search of a Future: Youth, Aspiration, and Mobility in Nepal

Chapter Four unpacks the decisions that students made in relation to their university studies. Drawing on the concept of ‘vital conjunctures’, it investigates to what extent students identified with ... More

Chapter Four unpacks the decisions that students made in relation to their university studies. Drawing on the concept of ‘vital conjunctures’, it investigates to what extent students identified with somewhat stereotypical images projected onto the public university campus and explains how educated young Nepalis tried to negotiate numerous competing social pressures on an everyday basis. In an effort to comply with established notions of female and male respectability, the students made use of the campus in different and often unexpected ways. In shifting the focus of the analysis onto the reasons behind students’ absence from and presence on campus, the chapter calls attention to the spatial dimension of young people’s agency and, in so doing, advances our conceptual understanding of vital conjunctures of youth.Less

Conjunctures of Mediations: The Historical Logics of Expatriate Nepal

Heather Hindman

in Mediating the Global: Expatria's Forms and Consequences in Kathmandu

What is the history of a community with no homeland? This chapter discusses precursors to contemporary expatriate life in Nepal, proposing that it is only through a set of contingent historical ... More

What is the history of a community with no homeland? This chapter discusses precursors to contemporary expatriate life in Nepal, proposing that it is only through a set of contingent historical conjunctures that modern expatriate life takes on the configuration that it does. British colonialism in India and related attitudes towards the family life of the British in India resonate with contemporary practices. Yet Nepal has its own distinctive relationship with foreign presence, shaped particularly by the collapse of the Rana Regime in 1950 and U.S. Cold War policy. The rise of Nepal as a destination on the Hippy Trail in the 1960s also contributed to the impressions and infrastructures of transnational labor in Kathmandu. These are intertwined with global ideas about overseas business that developed after World War II. Bringing together these diverse stories provides a basis for the rise of Expatria in late twentieth-century Kathmandu.Less

The Origins of Pegu and Its Founding Fathers

Michael A. Aung-Thwin

in Myanmar in the Fifteenth Century: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

The origins of the First Pegu Dynasty began at Muttama (Martaban) in the second half of the thirteenth-century. It was shaped by several “push” and “pull” factors then current in the region, ... More

The origins of the First Pegu Dynasty began at Muttama (Martaban) in the second half of the thirteenth-century. It was shaped by several “push” and “pull” factors then current in the region, particularly several long-term patterns between the eleventh and sixteenth-centuries, some of which came together only during the second half of the thirteenth, creating a “conjuncture” in Fernand Braudel’s sense, with a direct and indirect impact on the making of the First Kingdom of Pegu. On the north was Pagan, whose decline allowed Lower Myanmar to assert its independence. To the west lay the maritime region of Arakan with its gaze towards both the Bay of Bengal and the interior of Upper Myanmar. Although it had not yet fully integrated the various components that came together subsequently in the sixteenth-century as the Kingdom of Mrauk-U, its underpinning maritime and commercial foundations were already there and operating, which were to affect the history of Pegu. On the other side of the Gulf of Muttama lay Ayuthaya, dominated by Thai speakers who had moved from their earlier centers in northern and central Thailand (the agrarian interior) to the increasingly blossoming commerce of the coasts, a process that was to have an impact on the rise and development of Pegu subsequently. Towards the south lay many port cities such as Htaway (Tavoy) and Myeik (Mergui), which acted as windows to Pegu’s external world and maritime Southeast Asia.Less

The Ultimate Conjuncture: What Shadows the Brain-Mind Merger?

Barbara Maria Stafford

in Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

This essay examines the physical and metaphysical, literal as well as metaphorical concept-phenomenon of shadow. By analyzing a range of sooty silhouettes and dusky patterns spanning the geometrical ... More

This essay examines the physical and metaphysical, literal as well as metaphorical concept-phenomenon of shadow. By analyzing a range of sooty silhouettes and dusky patterns spanning the geometrical to the shapeless, it asks how such strange and uncanny variations on the intensity of darkness from blackish to dim operate not only across the spatial arts but cloud what is happening to our brains in times of cognitive automatism when tracking and collecting algorithms rule. By investigating this emerging shadow- land of troubled conjuncture wherein the brain-mind is no longer seen as a tightly encased organ but is ambiguously merged with other bodies, species, materials, machines, key aesthetic and philosophical implications come to the fore. Identifying the opaque socio-cultural forces pressuring for the creation of this shady combinatoric sheds light on the disturbing turn to universal datafication and our aggregated online selves caught up in the obscure flows of information.Less

Conclusion: Fandom and Other Transnational Futures

Aswin Punathambekar

in From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry

This concluding chapter describes Bollywood's emergent cultural geography. First, the film industry is a transnational cultural and industrial formation. The creation of Bollywood is related to the ... More

This concluding chapter describes Bollywood's emergent cultural geography. First, the film industry is a transnational cultural and industrial formation. The creation of Bollywood is related to the sociohistorical conjuncture of in the early 1990s that experienced numerous political transitions such as the Indian state's adoption and gradual legitimization of neoliberal economic policies. Second, Bollywood is part of ongoing transformations in relations between capital, space, and cultural production. It is shaped by the uneven and highly differentiated nature of capitalist transformation in India and specifically the city of Bombay since the early 1990s. Finally, Bollywood is a site of technological and industrial convergence. Bombay's position as a center of trade and commerce, made it a preeminent media capital in India.Less

Wendy Brown

John Clarke, Wendy Brown, Allan Cochrane, Davina Cooper, Larry Grossberg, Wendy Larner, Gail Lewis, Tania Murray Li, Jeff Maskovsky, Janet Newman, Anu (Aradhana) Sharma, Paul Stubbs, and Fiona Williams

in Critical Dialogues: Thinking Together in Turbulent Times

The chapter opens with a conversation about the demands and difficulties of theory, before turning to a reflection on the pleasures of seductions of discovering theory. We then reflect on the spaces ... More

The chapter opens with a conversation about the demands and difficulties of theory, before turning to a reflection on the pleasures of seductions of discovering theory. We then reflect on the spaces between theory and politics before turning to issues of intellectual and political ambivalence.Less

Becoming Bhikkhunis, Becoming Theravada

Nirmala S. Salgado

in Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In Search of the Female Renunciant

This chapter focuses on the category of “Theravada” in relation to questions of monastic seniority and power in the debates about Theravada bhikkhunī upasampadās. Using the work of Ananda Abeysekara, ... More

This chapter focuses on the category of “Theravada” in relation to questions of monastic seniority and power in the debates about Theravada bhikkhunī upasampadās. Using the work of Ananda Abeysekara, and interviews with Sri Lankan monks and nuns since the 1980s, it proposes that competing claims about the Theravada authenticity of recent upasampadās of Sri Lankan nuns are inseparable from claims about power. Monastics participating in Sri Lankan Buddhist missions outside the country as well as Sri Lankan bhikkhunī ordinations throughout the world may assert a distinctively Theravada identity in connection with upasampadās of Sri Lankan bhikkhunīs. Yet, this chapter seeks not to assess the authenticity of those ordinations but rather to consider the conjunctures in which they occur. Ultimately, it argues that the category of Theravada cannot figure into the everyday life of practitioners apart from the debates in which that category is rooted.Less

Populations Are Composed One Event at a Time

Jennifer A. Johnson-Hanks

in Population in the Human Sciences: Concepts, Models, Evidence

This chapter uses ethnographic data to present a framework for considering how subpopulations are built up in society, and the implications of such processes. Population units are social products not ... More

This chapter uses ethnographic data to present a framework for considering how subpopulations are built up in society, and the implications of such processes. Population units are social products not primarily as objects of cultural discourse, but rather as built up differentially by individual agents selecting themselves into or out of subpopulations through specific events in socially structured ways. Differences in vital rates therefore arise through the ways subpopulations are put together, and compositional demography may be grounded in mainstream sociological theory. In contrast, demographic practice usually handles this topic in terms of ‘selectivity’—as a data problem to be controlled for. But controlling for this kind of selection eliminates many key processes of demographic interest. If young African women seek education in order to lead ‘modern’ reproductive lives, then trying to identify exogenous effects of education by controlling for aspirations leads us astray. In such cases, selection is the story.Less

Population ageing and conjunctural action

Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill

in The Anthropological Demography of Health

One of the most promising conceptual and empirical breakthroughs to emerge from combined anthropological and demographic thinking is the theory of conjunctural action. Developed in a sequence of ... More

One of the most promising conceptual and empirical breakthroughs to emerge from combined anthropological and demographic thinking is the theory of conjunctural action. Developed in a sequence of articles and books by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, this approach provides an effective alternative to rationalist decision-making models that have prevailed in population studies over the whole post-War period. Observation and analysis of vital conjunctures show how social, economic, and political differences between groups in society are manifested in individual agency at specific points across the life course, and how people’s behaviour in this way differentiates the many subpopulations making up a society. The approach thus addresses directly two major shortcomings in population research: the need to explain mechanisms underlying the evolution of population heterogeneity, and the dynamics that entrench inequalities. To date, the study of conjunctural action has been addressed chiefly to fertility. In this chapter, we explore how health issues facing older people, their families, and communities are illuminated by this approach, drawing on multi-site, longitudinal ethnographic and demographic research in Indonesia. We begin with the nature of uncertainty and vulnerability at older ages, and how it can be modelled across the life course. This leads to consideration of the dynamic relation between individual action and subpopulation memberships, and how it articulates the compositional demography of status, network, ethnic, and related subpopulation memberships.Less

Incapacity and debility among Pakistani migrants and minorities in the United Kingdom

Kaveri Qureshi

in The Anthropological Demography of Health

In light of demography’s situation as the disciplinary handmaiden to the economization of human life, this chapter draws out a crucial and obvious extension of anthropological demographic approaches ... More

In light of demography’s situation as the disciplinary handmaiden to the economization of human life, this chapter draws out a crucial and obvious extension of anthropological demographic approaches to health: incapacity, namely the inability to work associated with sickness or disability. The chapter develops a recent analysis of incapacity, which has highlighted the political creation, and even the expediency, of incapacity as a labour market and social security category particularly in the United Kingdom. To date, this analysis has centred primarily on regional, class, and educational inequalities as drivers of incapacity, which emerges as a local response to policies of deindustrialization and economic restructuring. However, the analysis of incapacity is becoming more nuanced, investigating intersectional inequalities associated with gender, age, racial/ethnic locations, and migration. This chapter applies conjunctural thinking to understanding these patterns in incapacity by examining the biographical contingency of chronic illness and disability among Pakistani migrants and minorities in the United Kingdom. The chapter highlights the morphology that structures the distribution of incapacity in society, and the resources people have to respond to this conjuncture. Countering the flat sociological picture of how people manage impairment in relation to work, the chapter argues that more attention needs to be given to the social relations of workplaces. The particular vulnerability of impaired British Pakistanis to labour market ejection reflects the occupational segregation of first-generation post-War Pakistani migrants in unskilled, declining industrial occupations, and the reproduction of labour market precarities in the so-called second generation.Less

Afterword

Yves Charbit, Véronique Petit, Kaveri Qureshi, and Philip Kreager

in The Anthropological Demography of Health

The extent to which health interventions actually improve people’s lives, and the extent to which interventions may become objects of widespread fear and mistrust, are issues that have recurred many ... More

The extent to which health interventions actually improve people’s lives, and the extent to which interventions may become objects of widespread fear and mistrust, are issues that have recurred many times throughout modern history. A dynamic arises at the conjunction of three formidable forces—local experience, institutional interventions, and scientific research—that is a compound of the fit, both good and bad, between them. Understanding this dynamism requires us not to privilege science, nor intervention programmes, nor local cultures—whether as the source of strengths, or weaknesses, in the collective effort to improve health. The Afterword reviews this dynamic, in two steps. First, it steps back from the conceptual and methodological detail of chapters in this book, giving a general view of the obstacles and challenges that remain. Historical prejudices, continuing limitations of data systems in monitoring migration and the spread of disease, the challenges posed for conventional demographics by climate change, and the longstanding demographic tendency to predefine implications of elementary fertility measurement, provide examples. Second, in the concluding sections, the chapter draws on the many case studies in the book to propose a preliminary typology of blockages that have arisen where there is a mismatch between research methods and the societies and cultures to which methods have been addressed. The anthropological demography of health, in the five-part structure of this book, provides an integrative framework which co-ordinates demography, epidemiology, history, linguistics, and other disciplines within a bottom-up, combined qualitative and quantitative approach to societies and their variation.Less

Introduction

Philip Kreager, Vénique Petit, Kaveri Qureshi, and Yves Charbit

in The Anthropological Demography of Health

Anthropological demography in recent decades has expanded beyond a focus on fertility regulation shared initially with demography, taking on a much wider range of health issues, and locating them in ... More

Anthropological demography in recent decades has expanded beyond a focus on fertility regulation shared initially with demography, taking on a much wider range of health issues, and locating them in the context of inequalities that have frequently given rise to major differentials of health and well-being. Key problems involve collaborative research with genetics, epidemiology, gerontology, clinical practice, linguistics, social and medical history, and also with historical and contemporary demography. This work prioritizes bottom-up inquiry, in which ethnography is combined with quantitative and historical methods. The approach provides more than substantive knowledge of the role of cultural and social formations in health variation; it enables examination of how local institutions and experience are translated into the demographic and health measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely. We are then in a position to consider the empirical adequacy of such translation, what happens when models and measures become standardized evaluations of health statuses, and what this implies for governance. The five principal parts of the book chart components of the current agenda, drawing on recent conceptual and methodological advances, with each section providing detailed case studies. Main themes include: the historical background to demographic governance and its continuing influence on health interventions in the global South; demographic translation—the analysis of whether conventional research and administrative instruments render people’s health experience accurately; compositional demography—the identification of local population units and structures that track people’s agency in health-seeking behaviour; and the reconceptualization of reproductive and related risks that this approach enables.Less