Unearthing Gender

Unearthing Gender

Author: Smita Tewari Jassal

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-03-28

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0822351307

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This book analyzes the folk songs from the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of North India to explore how ideas of gender, caste, and class are socially constructed, transmitted, questioned, and reaffirmed through their performance.


The Invisible Sex

The Invisible Sex

Author: J. M. Adovasio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 131541807X

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Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. Recent archaeological research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer, two of the world's leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving, present an exciting new look at prehistory. With science writer Jake Page, they argue that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.


The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology

The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology

Author: Augustine Brannigan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1351475037

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This unflinching effort critically traces the attempt of social psychology over the past half century to forge a scientific understanding of human behavior based on the systematic use of experiments.Having examined the record from the inception of the field to the present, Brannigan suggests that it has failed to live up to its promise: that social psychologists have achieved little consensus about the central problems in the field; that they have failed to amass a body of systematic, non-trivial theoretical insight; and that recent concerns over the ethical treatment of human subjects could arguably bring the discipline to closure. But that is not the disastrous outcome that Brannigan hopes for. Rather, going beyond an apparent iconoclasm, the author explores prospects for a post-experimental discipline. It is a view that admits the role of ethical considerations as part of scientific judgment, but not as a sacrifice of, but an extension of, empirical research that takes seriously how the brain represents information, and how these mechanisms explain social behaviors and channel human choices and appetites.What makes this work special is its function as a primary text in the history as well as the current status of social psychology as a field of behavioral science. The keen insight, touched by the gently critical styles, of such major figures as Philip Zimbardo, Morton Hunt, Leon Festinger, Stanley Milgram, Alex Crey, Samuel Wineburg, Carol Gilligan, David M. Buss--among others--makes this a perfect volume for students entering the field, and no less, a reminder of the past as well as present of social psychology for its serious practitioners.


The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection

Author: Uwe Flick

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2017-12-14

Total Pages: 1143

ISBN-13: 1526416042

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How we understand and define qualitative data is changing, with implications not only for the techniques of data analysis, but also how data are collected. New devices, technologies and online spaces open up new ways for researchers to approach and collect images, moving images, text and talk. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection systematically explores the approaches, techniques, debates and new frontiers for creating, collecting and producing qualitative data. Bringing together contributions from internationally leading scholars in the field, the handbook offers a state-of-the-art look at key themes across six thematic parts: Part I Charting the Routes Part II Concepts, Contexts, Basics Part III Types of Data and How to Collect Them Part IV Digital and Internet Data Part V Triangulation and Mixed Methods Part VI Collecting Data in Specific Populations


Gods in the World

Gods in the World

Author: Aftab S. Jassal

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-11-05

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0231560559

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In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them—in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities. Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.


Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration

Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration

Author: Sadan Jha

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1000429423

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This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.


Courting Desire

Courting Desire

Author: Rama Srinivasan

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1978803559

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Inquiries into marital patterns can serve as an effective lens to analyze social structures and material cultures not only on the question of sexuality, but also on the nature of a private citizen’s engagement with state and law. Through ethnographic research in courtrooms, community,and kinship spaces, the author outlines the transformations in material culture and political economy that have led to renewed negotiations on the institution of marriage in North India, especially in legal spaces. Tracing organically evolving notions of sexual consent and legal subjectivity, Courting Desire underlines how non-normative decisions regarding marriage become possible in a region otherwise known for high instances of honor killings and rigid kinship structures. Aspirations for consensual relationships have led to a tentative attempt to forge relationships that are non-normative but grudgingly approved after state intervention. The book traces this nascent and under-explored trend in the North Indian landscape.


Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India

Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India

Author: Pushpesh Kumar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1000415880

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This volume explores existing and emerging sexual cultures of contemporary India and the predicaments faced by abjected and sexual marginalities. It traces the sexual politics within popular culture, literary genres, advertisement, consumerism, globalizing cities, social movements, law, scientific research, the Hijra community life, (alternative) families and kinship and sites that define the cultural other whose sexual practices or identities fall beyond normative moral conventions. The chapters examine a range of connected sociological and political issues including questions of agency, judgments around intimate sexual relationships, the role of the state, popular understandings of adolescent romance, notion of legitimacy and stigma, moral policing and resistance, body politics and marginality, representations in popular and folk culture, sexual violence and freedom, problems with historiography, structural inequalities, queer erotica, gay consumerism, Hijra suicides and marriage and divorce. The volume also proposes certain transformative possibilities towards envisioning and (re)scripting sexual equalities. This interdisciplinary book will be important for those interested in sexuality studies, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history, literature and Global South studies as well as policymakers, civil society activists and nongovernmental organizations working in the area.


Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Ellen Lewin

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-07-07

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0813574315

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Feminist anthropology emerged in the 1970s as a much-needed corrective to the discipline’s androcentric biases. Far from being a marginalized subfield, it has been at the forefront of developments that have revolutionized not only anthropology, but also a host of other disciplines. This landmark collection of essays provides a contemporary overview of feminist anthropology’s historical and theoretical origins, the transformations it has undergone, and the vital contributions it continues to make to cutting-edge scholarship. Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century brings together a variety of contributors, giving a voice to both younger researchers and pioneering scholars who offer insider perspectives on the field’s foundational moments. Some chapters reveal how the rise of feminist anthropology shaped—and was shaped by—the emergence of fields like women’s studies, black and Latina studies, and LGBTQ studies. Others consider how feminist anthropologists are helping to frame the direction of developing disciplines like masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. Spanning the globe—from India to Canada, from Vietnam to Peru—Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century reveals the important role that feminist anthropologists have played in worldwide campaigns against human rights abuses, domestic violence, and environmental degradation. It also celebrates the work they have done closer to home, helping to explode the developed world’s preconceptions about sex, gender, and sexuality.


Recipes and Songs

Recipes and Songs

Author: Razia Parveen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 3319502468

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This book presents a systematic approach to the literary analysis of cultural practices. Based on a postcolonial framework of diaspora, the book utilizes literary theory to investigate cultural phenomena such as food preparation and song. Razia Parveen explores various diverse themes, including the female voice, genealogy, space, time, and diaspora, and applies them to the analysis of community identity. This volume also demonstrates how a literary analysis of oral texts helps to provide insight into women’s lived narratives. For example, Parveen discusses how the notion of the ‘third space’ creates a distinctly feminine spatiality.