The ‘Civilizing Mission’: The Regulation and Control of Mourning in Colonial India

The control of women's public form of mourning in India was undertaken in the colonial era by male social reformers. The article argues that this was both a part of the process which enabled the consolidation of colonial rule – since laments were repositories for the social memory of the dead which could lead to vendettas – and that this fed into the construction of a specific domestic ideology. The latter was predicated on the privatization and interiorization of grief, whereby women were enjoined to bear themselves with rectitude. The taming of the transgressive form of mourning, whereby women who had earlier exhibited their grievances in a spectacular form through lament, took to more quietist (devotional) forms, has reconfigured the relationship to death and mourning. However, this has been a partial phenomenon, limited to the upper-caste, middle-class milieu. Where women continue to hold a dependent position within community, nation-state and international economy, the article suggests that, in contexts of modern conflicts and warfare, where death runs ‘wild’, the exhibitionist and ‘wild’ forms of showing grief and anger continue to be demonstrated by women as an appropriate public response.     

Environmental education and awareness: the present and future key to the sustainable management of Ramsar convention sites in Kenya

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The Ramsar wetland sites are important habitats for biodiversity and provide ecological services to communities that otherwise...     

Accidental death resulting from acetylene cylinder impact

Acetylene is an inflammable gas commonly used for welding in small-scale industries. We present a case of a 34-year-old male welder who died following injuries sustained from explosion of an acetylene gas-welding cylinder. In this case report, we discuss the circumstances leading to the explosion of the welding cylinder, the autopsy findings, and a brief review of the literature on deaths resulting from blasts of acetylene cylinders.     

The Political Ecology of Nostalgia

A virtual revolution in transport, telecommunications, and computational technologies is rapidly blurring the distinction between domestic and international economies....any domestic growth strategy must, almost by definition, be an export-oriented strategy....the highest growth rates and most exciting new market opportunities are in the Western Hemisphere, in Latin America, and most especially in the Pacific Rim. - Roy MacLaren, Canadian Minister for International Trade (italic added).