Market-driven dairying and the politics of value,labor and affect in Gujarat,India

Ethnography in Gujarat, India’s poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This contribution reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value, and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human–animal relations challenge both capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.     

Study in blue: trauma,affect, event

As contemporary student activists in the United States embrace a vocabulary of trauma and microaggressions, some critics on the left consider this a depoliticizing move symptomatic of the university’s growing thralldom to neoliberalism. The author argues that such criticism neglects how talk of trauma and microaggressions attempts to affectively manage structural violence’s failure to manifest in the form of discrete, identifiable, and extraordinary events. To illustrate this, she turns to the poetry of Claudia Rankine and the performance art of Emma Sulkowicz as aesthetic treatments of racial microaggression and sexual trauma, respectively. Rankine’s and Sulkowicz’s works belong to an emergent genre the author calls the coincidence report, in which subjects with no proof of structural violence except for their own feelings must cope with what happens when an event doesn’t. Ultimately, both artists sideline attempts to reconstruct the event in favor of redistributing specific affects throughout their respective publics. In both cases, these affects are blue – that is, depressive (Rankine) and obscene (Sulkowicz). Subjects in the blue find themselves ambivalently attached to living politically in the shadow of an event even as they detach from the fantasy that political life is less disappointing, depressing, or deflating than it actually is.     

museums,poetics and affect

This paper follows the Salt-Wind and subterraneous freshwater flows in Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall's collection of poetry The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai. McDougall illustrates that in order to begin again in the aftermath of American imperialism and environmental destruction, one must return to the salt-water and sub-surface waterings, and the ancestral connections and voices therein who beckon her (and others) home. In this way, her work is situated within contemporary movements within the Pacific, presently coming together in deimperializing efforts to restructure a future for the Pacific that is ‘beyond empires’ (Fujikane, 2012: 191). Selecting two poems in particular from McDougall's collection—‘Hāloanaka’ and ‘On a Routing Slip from the U.S. Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’—I illustrate how they chart the ancestral, cosmological, and historical flows of kinship between Kānaka Maoli and their near and distant earthly and spiritual relations. In particular, the water that passes through the taro plant infuses all manner of kinship, economic, and social relations in Hawai‘i, connecting Kānaka Maoli to their ancestor Hāloa, and to land, sea, and each other, as well as—through the formative oceanic movements of Moana Nui—to other Pacific islanders. A thirst for water—sacred, imaginative, mobile, past, present—underwritten by an assertion of Hawaiian sovereignty, language, and tradition flows just beneath the surface of McDougall's words.     

gendering creolisation: creolising affect

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport.     

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.     

Feminism,imperialism and race: a dialogue between India and Britain

Abstract

During the partition period and up to 1918, Polish women's interests and aspirations outside the family were in increasingly frequent cases directed to taking up paid work and resorting to other measures in order to sustain their family. In other cases women's activity was shaped by experiences of resistance to national and sometimes also religious discrimination. In the early twentieth century only small groups of women put forward demands for equality, and even if they did so, they usually thought that this would be possible only after the rebirth of an independent foolish state. It is to this supreme aim that they subordinated their interest and their struggle for equality.     

Relating feminisms,nationalisms and imperialisms: Ireland,India and Margaret Cousins's sexual politics

Abstract

From 1907 to 1913 Margaret Cousins was one of the most prominent leaders of the Irish Women's Franchise League, the most militant of the various Irish suffragist groups. A Theosophist, Cousins left Ireland in 1913 for Theosophical headquarters in Madras, spurred by her commitment to “the cause of womanhood the world over”. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Cousins played a central role in certain forms of Indian feminist and cultural nationalist movements. This article attempts to sketch some of the ways in which Cousins's class and imperial situation provoked and limited her feminist ideology.     

Debt and vulnerability: indebtedness,institutions and smallholder agriculture in South India

ABSTRACT

Expanding access to credit remains a key central government strategy for promoting agricultural development and livelihood diversification in south India and more widely. Smallholders borrowing from multiple credit sources are faced with obligations in addition to financial repayment. Available evidence on the consequences of indebtedness extending beyond monetary debt and its influence on vulnerability is incomplete in important ways. This paper presents an integrated vulnerability framework and illustrates the framework through case studies of three pairs of smallholder clients and credit sources. Using process-tracing and progressive contextualization methods, this paper shows the diversity of feedbacks that shape indebtedness and provides examples of social-ecological consequences. Unpacking these consequences in individual cases demonstrates indebtedness as an important root cause of vulnerability, which is in contrast to an examination of proximate causes, such as credit policy or temperature, that is the focus of a large share of scholarship. The paper shows that different credit sources are associated with different sets of obligations, leading to varied livelihood and agricultural consequences. Suggesting ‘credit stacking’ as an important adaptation strategy and research agenda item, the paper makes a plea for careful analysis of the conditions when credit is a factor in adaptive capacity and indebtedness of vulnerability.     

Women,poverty and agricultural growth in India

This article explores the interlinkages between gender, poverty and agricultural growth in India. It shows how women and female children of poor rural households bear a disproportionately high share of the burden of poverty. This is manifest especially in a systematic bias against females in the intra‐household distribution of food and health care. However, there are significant cross‐regional differences in the extent of the bias which is much higher in the north‐western states relative to the southern. Some of the likely factors ‐ economic, social, historical ‐ underlying these differences are discussed here. The specific problems of female‐headed households are separately considered. Also, the on‐going debate on the relationship between rural poverty and agricultural growth is critically examined. In addition, a detailed quantitative analysis is undertaken of the differential effects of the new agricultural technology, and associated growth, on the employment and earnings of female and male agricultural labourers (who constitute the bulk of the rural poor). The association between changes in these economic variables and others, such as in the incidence and pattern of dowry payments, is also examined, as are the implications of both these aspects for the situation of rural women in poverty in different geographic regions.     

same-sex weddings,Hindu traditions and modern India

This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show that people can and do draw on traditional Hindu ideas about love (as the product of attachments formed in former lives), rebirth (attachments persist from one birth to another) and marriage (which is supposed to outlast one lifetime) to legitimize socially disapproved unions, both cross-sex and same-sex. Right-wing Hindu forces today mistakenly argue that the idea of same-sex love and marriage, and indeed of marriage based on love itself, are Western imports. In fact, same-sex marriages were reported from rural areas and small towns long before the Indian LGBT movement took cognizance of the issue. When families accept them, female couples are generally able to stay together but when families violently oppose them, often with the collusion of local police, couples may be forced to separate or driven to suicide, even though law courts have uniformly upheld the right of consenting adults to live together. Modern Hindu teachers and priests are divided on the question of the validity and desirability of same-sex marriage; a doctrinal debate is now developing.     

Gender,Thrift and Indigenous Adaptations: money and missionary medicine in colonial India

This article examines the skills in money and the management of resources that were developed by women missionaries in India between the 1870s and the 1940s. Focusing on the strategies and initiatives of three physicians—Clara Swain, Anna Kugler and Edith Brown—it argues that women disrupted existing patriarchal arrangements by entering ‘male’ domains of finance and administration. Modest ventures were transformed into state institutions through alliances with stakeholders, including missionary boards and donors at ‘home’ as well as members of indigenous elites who provided valuable land donations. Western institutional models needed to be adapted to function within local economies. Western missionary women used an interesting blend of thrift, innovation and indigenization to stretch their material and human resources. Thus, women physicians used their medical work with overseas missions to carve out new roles, which empowered them socially and professionally.