Colonial and Postcolonial Histories: comparative reflections on the legacies of empire

human development, culture

From little king to landlord: property, law and the gift under permanent settlement

This paper concerns the set of issues surrounding the imposition in south India of a Permanent Settlement in 1803 for the local "nobility" -- the "ancient zamindars and polygars." I focus here on the "little kings" themselves, their transformation into "landlords", and the implications of the new political economy for the old political logic in which law, property, and the state were linked in very different ways. I look in particular at the problems concerning "alienation" under the Permanent Settlement, the fact that landlords, in contravention of the principles of profit and management, continued to make gifts of land. I conclude by examining the implications of my narratives for a consideration of colonial state and society, with respect in particular to the praxis of culture and the discourse of law. I demonstrate that all colonial transformations were, for inherent structural reasons, incompletely realized

The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India

Also CSST Working Paper #11.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51136/1/368.pd

Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact

Also CSST Working Paper #16.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51143/1/375.pd

The Original Caste: Power, History, and Hierarchy in South Asia

Also CSST Working Paper #10.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51135/1/367.pd

The pasts of a Pālaiyakārar : the ethnohistory of a south Indian little king

This paper examines a text which is the family history of a line of south Indian "little kings," or pālaiyakārars. Beginning with a discussion of different modes of history, I analyze this text as both a statement of a particular history and a cultural representation of a more general modality of history. As a particular history, this text enables me to talk about conceptions of royal appropriateness and sovereignty, of political relations, and of kingly privileges; as a cultural form the text provides clues about the relations of these cultural conceptions to a structural form of narrative emplotment with all its underlying assumptions about time, causation, and process. Finally, I consider how a hermeneutical exercise of this sort is very important for Western analysts who wish to reconstruct the "history" of south Indian politics

IDeF-X ASIC for Cd(Zn)Te spectro-imaging systems

Joint progresses in Cd(Zn)Te detectors, microelectronics and interconnection technologies open the way for a new generation of instruments for physics and astrophysics applications in the energy range from 1 to 1000 keV. Even working between -20 and 20 degrees Celsius, these instruments will offer high spatial resolution (pixel size ranging from 300 x 300 square micrometers to few square millimeters), high spectral response and high detection efficiency. To reach these goals, reliable, highly integrated, low noise and low power consumption electronics is mandatory. Our group is currently developing a new ASIC detector front-end named IDeF-X, for modular spectro-imaging system based on the use of Cd(Zn)Te detectors. We present here the first version of IDeF-X which consists in a set of ten low noise charge sensitive preamplifiers (CSA). It has been processed with the standard AMS 0.35 micrometer CMOS technology. The CSA are designed to be DC coupled to detectors having a low dark current at room temperature. The various preamps implemented are optimized for detector capacitances ranging from 0.5 up to 30 pF.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures, IEEE NSS-MIC conference in Rome 2004, submitted to IEEE TNS, correction in unit of figure

Cancer and Stem Cell Biology: How Tightly Intertwined?

Ever since the discovery of cancer stem cells in leukemia and, more recently, in solid tumors, enormous attention has been paid to the apparent stem cell nature of cancer. These concepts were the focus of the “Stem Cells and Cancer” symposium held recently at the University of California, San Francisco, and the inspiration for this overview of current research and important questions emerging in this area

Culture/Power/History: Series Prospectus

Also CSST Working Paper #23.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51154/1/386.pd

Date and Rate of Corn Planting

Corn is South Dakota’s most important grain crop. It is grown on 4 million acres annually. South Dakota ranks ninth among the states as a corn producer, having one-twentieth of the national acreage and one-thirtieth of the production. The state may be divided into three areas on the basis of the place of corn on the farm: the eastern area, where corn is complementary to wheat and grazing; and the western area, where corn is supplementary grazing