Civilizing tastes: From caste to class in South Indian foodways

Anthropological explorations of food in South Asia are often framed by theories of caste and ritual purity or pollution, with the highest castes characterised as protecting their purity by accepting food from no-one of lower caste status, and those at the bottom accepting food from anyone. The problem with this focus on caste is not that it is misguided per se; many Hindus do indeed regulate their consumption in relation to such concerns, and a quotidian understanding of caste remains vital in understanding how people in India relate to one another. Rather, the problem is that our focus on caste as the defining social institution of India has obscured social relationships defined by other cross-cutting hierarchies that also, and increasingly, reflect and shape Indian foodways. Drawing on prolonged ethnographic fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, South India, this chapter is concerned with how class in particular – both in terms of economic status and as a marker of distinction – also has profound implications for what people in South India eat, with whom, and why; particularly in the wake of the economic liberalisation that began in the 1990s and the emergence of new foods and tastes ripe for symbolic appropriation

Future tense capital, labor, and technology in a service Industry

Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our research explores the complex interplay between work, personal aspirations, social futures, and transformations in global capitalism. Our informants' experiences with affective labor performed at a distance provide us with critical insights into capital, labor, and technology in our rapidly changing world. Movement characterizes the industry and its workers as they communicate across spatial, linguistic, and cultural distance, while simultaneously being emplaced by regimes of racialized labor. We draw on long-Term fieldwork to analyze the complexity and density of interactions between imagination, aspiration, technology, and work for upwardly mobile classes in the Global South

Sequencing Operations to Minimize In-Process Inventory Costs

A solution is presented for the problem of determining the sequence in which a set of manufacturing operations should be carried out in order to minimize in-process inventory costs while meeting a variety of technological constraints. Both strict precedence constraints and contiguity constraints are considered, the latter dealing with the requirement that certain sets of operations be performed contiguously (but without specification of any order).

The New Heroine? Gender Representations in Contemporary Pakistani Dramas

This chapter studies the representation of the ‘new Pakistani women’ in contemporary Urdu dramas. Specifically, it examines the heroines of four recent dramas that have been celebrated for their progressive outlook on women’s issues. I argue that the discourse on women’s rights has been reinterpreted to shape a normative role model for urban middle-class women. This new woman is set in opposition to the upper-class, ‘westernized’ women as well as to ‘backward’, lower-class women. She is expected to be educated, self-reliant, and aware of her rights but also family-oriented, respectable, pious, and above all, ready to compromise on her desires in order to avoid familial and social conflict. By doing so, she preserves the unity of the family and by extension of the nation

The (im)possibility of decolonising gender in South Asia: a reading of Bollywood’s ‘new women’

This paper highlights tensions in the continuity of coloniality and the decoloniality of gender as represented within portrayals of new women in Bollywood, through an analysis of the heroines’ dance, sexuality, anger and consumption. This reading of Bollywood’s new women alludes to the (im)possibility of decolonising gender in South Asia, arguing that the emergent female subjects of these movies find themselves in cross-pulls between the need for self-realisation, neo-liberalism, and national identity. Our analysis reveals within these multiple cross-pulls there are moments that rupture the narratives of coloniality/modernity, by proposing a version of what Partha Chatterjee’s called ‘our modernity’. These narrative ruptures allow us to challenge historically received notions of identity and representations of Third World women, and of gender in South Asia. At the same time, the characters analysed within this paper continue to uncritically subscribe to colonial forms of modernity, through active participation as workers and consumers in the capitalist economy