Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302

Book review of Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302.Recensione di Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302

Enacting nationalist history: Buildings, processions and sound in the making of a village in Central India

In this paper we look at how some big ideas to do with nationalism and religion have been translated into the everyday spaces of a village in Central India over the last sixty years. This particular village was studied by Adrian Mayer in the 1950s and, more recently, by Tommaso Sbriccoli, which gives our ethnographic approach a strong and original diachronic dimension. We suggest that religion has replaced caste hierarchy as the principle mode in which social differentiation is discussed, and that anti-Muslim discourse permits high caste Hindus to de-politicise and thus conceal structured relations of inequality with low caste Hindus. We examine the ways in which competitive building projects, ritualised processions and sounds are used to contest meaning at the village level. Instead of seeing public spaces as conservative arenas intended to check exuberance and excess, we see them as places for experimentation and social change, and as the spaces in which Indian post-colonial history is being staged

Discipline al lavoro

In recent years, we have been witnessing an increasing involvement of anthropologists as workers within the Italian system of shelter for asylum seekers and refugees. Such involvement deserves to be investigated for many reasons. On one side, it illustrates what role and function society at large believes anthropology should take on. On the other side, it also makes explicit what role and competences anthropologists themselves deem to be able to perform and deploy. At the same time, it also shows the complex relations that are produced – in the neo-liberal context of dismantling of public university and externalization of welfare services – between academia, market, civil society and institutions. Finally, such collaboration of our discipline with institutions governing Other’s life inevitably evokes past connections between anthropology and colonialism and consequently asks for a particularly sound analytical effort. In this article, I will thus delineate some areas of problematization of the roles of anthropologists within the area of administration of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives. I will thus shade light on the discursive and institutional devices operating in such field, showing how the knowledge and roles that anthropologists respectively deploy and enact work, or might work, in a twofold direction. On one side, in fact, they further structure the field in which they are inserted. On the other side, they can trigger what Lotman defines “explosive events”, by calling into question practices and models at work and pushing the contexts in which they are inserted towards unexpected reconfigurations

Babu Farari

This article, drawing on research carried out in the village of Jamgod (India, Madhya Pradesh), present the story of Babu Farari, an outlaw living and operating in this area in the 50s. First met during fieldwork as a legend about a local social bandit, the figure of Babu grew to acquire a deeper, three-dimensional complexity. His story has been reconstructed here from fragments of ethnography, interviews and conversations, and from information contained in the fieldnotes of Mayer, an anthropologist who did research in the same village when Babu Farari was active. This polyvocal narrative shows a “legend in the making” and provides insight into the way in which stories are embedded within wider social and political frameworks and how local history acquires meaning only in relation to contemporary social and political events. Indeed, details in the various narratives about Babu Farari’s life give rise to features of present-day local moral economies and folk ethics about State, power and the Self.Cet article, qui s’appuie sur des recherches menées dans le village de Jamgod (Inde, État de Madhya Pradesh), présente l’histoire de Babu Farari, un hors-la-loi qui vivait et opérait dans la région dans les années 1950. Rencontré pour la première fois au cours du travail de terrain comme une légende sur un bandit social local, le personnage de Babu a acquis une complexité plus profonde et tridimensionnelle. Son histoire a été reconstituée ici à partir de fragments d’ethnographie, d’entretiens et de conversations, ainsi que d’informations contenues dans les notes de terrain de Mayer, un anthropologue qui a effectué des recherches dans le même village lorsque Babu Farari était vivant. Ce récit polyvocal montre une « légende en train de se faire » et donne un aperçu de la manière dont les histoires sont intégrées dans des cadres sociaux et politiques plus larges et dont l’histoire locale n'acquiert de sens que par rapport aux événements sociaux et politiques contemporains. Les multiples Babu Farari qui m’ont été narrés sont autant de versions des économies morales actuelles et des éthiques populaires sur l’État, le pouvoir et la construction du soi

"Inheritance Rights for Women. A Response to Some Commonly Expressed Fears"

Madhu Kishwar, Ruth Vanita, 1990, “Inheritance Rights for Women: A Response to Some Commonly Expressed Fears”, Manushi, 57 (March-April): 3-9. This committed paper deals with some of the fears commonly expressed in mainstream (male) political discourse regarding women’s inheritance rights in order to confute them and provide alternative proposals for actually getting women equal inheritance rights. Even if it address mainly Hindu law and Hindu customary legal practice, it could be useful for ..

"She Comes to Take her Rights. Indian Women, Property, and Propriety"

Basu, S., 1995, She Comes to Take her Rights. Indian Women, Property, and Propriety, State University of New York Press This book is a really useful reference work for our project. Even if it focuses on issues related to property and inheritance in Delhi urban contexts almost exclusively concerning Hindu women (very few references are made to Muslim women cases, though some interesting discussions on such matters are present) its methodological and theoretical framework could help us in formu..

“Coniugality, Law, and State: Inheritance Rights as Pivot Control in Northern India”

Chowdhry, P., 2005, “Coniugality, Law, and State: Inheritance Rights as Pivot Control in Northern India”, in Basu, S. (ed), Dowry and Inheritance, London and New York: Zed Books. This paper by Prem Chowdry focuses on the relationship between inheritance rights of women and widow remarriage, and the role which the state has played in controlling and regulating it, both in colonial and post-colonial periods. The main argument, as stated by the author, is that “the custom of widow remarriage, as..

“Divorce Among Indian Muslims. Survey Report from Bombay and Pune”

Munira Merchant, 1993, “Divorce Among Indian Muslims. Survey Report from Bombay and Pune”, Manushi, 77 (July-August): 9-12. This really short paper is interesting because it is based on a survey on a wide sample (100 couples) of Muslim divorced women and highlights important aspects of disputes over property and maintenance both within community forums (kazi, marriage councils) and at the state judicial level. The aim of the survey was to study the impact of the provisions in the law (Muslim ..

“Muslim Women’s Rights to Inheritance. Shari‘a law and its practice among the Dawwodi Bohras of Udaipur, Rajasthan”

Zenab Banu, 1995, “Muslim Women’s Rights to Inheritance. Shari‘a law and its practice among the Dawwodi Bohras of Udaipur, Rajasthan”, in Engineer A. A., Problems of Muslim Women in India, Orient Longman: Hyderabad: 34-39. This short paper addresses the case of the women belonging to the Dawoodi Bohras sect in Udaipur attempting to answer to the following questions: To what extent are women’s rights to inherit honoured in Islamic society? Do Muslim women actually get their share of movable ..