Migration, bachelorhood and discontent among the Patidars

Juxtaposing data collected in the 1950s with data from 2013, this article describes some of the consequences of a crisis of agriculture in India, as a crisis of values and aspirations. Among a relatively prosperous Patidar community in western India, agriculture continues to be economically remunerative while farmers are considered poor. Instead, the ability to secure a job away from the land, to move out of the village and possibly overseas have come to constitute new markers of status in a traditionally competitive society. The article departs from common representations of the caste as an upwardly mobile and successful group, and focuses instead on the discontent and on those who try to achieve the new values of the caste but fail. As a consequence of failure it shows how Patidars recur to what from an outsider’s point of view may seem paradoxical: in order to ‘move up’ and participate in the culture and economy of the caste, they have to ‘move down’. In this respect, the article also contributes to understanding the unevenness of India’s growth and the contrary trends that both work to strengthen and weaken caste identity

On trusting ethnography: serendipity and the reflexive return to the fields of Gujarat

We draw on David Pocock's fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. Revisiting where Pocock had been through new fieldwork, we were encouraged to think about the ways in which places are accessed and subsequently understood. Against our conscious will, the pathways we were able to take through the field strongly resembled those Pocock took sixty years earlier. The coincidence is such that the material casts shadows of doubt over the potency of terms such as ‘serendipity’ and ‘chance’ to characterize key moments of ethnographic fieldwork. Against the primacy given to the self in much reflexive anthropology, we demonstrate that the personal attributes of the anthropologist might influence the production of ethnographic research less than is generally assumed. The double bind of our ‘reflexive return’ comes from revisiting an anthropological field and experiencing the agency of that field in making what we can know

Marriage and the crisis of peasant society in Gujarat, India

This contribution takes marriage as the example of a crisis of production and reproduction in rural India. Through the juxtaposition of ethnography separated by six decades, we detail a shift away from land and agriculture as the primary markers of status among the Patidars of central Gujarat, western India, in favour of a hierarchical understanding of international migration. The paper discusses the disconnect between a cultural revolution in favour of migration, and the failure of many to live up to their own cultural standards. More broadly, we reflect on the forces that simultaneously strengthen and dissolve caste inequality in the context of India's uneven growth

In search of an Adivasi worldview : identity, development and the Adivasi Museum of Voice in western India

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Vaacha: A Museum from the Tribal Point of View

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Broken Gods: Collaborative Filmmaking in troubled times

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On politics and precarity in academia

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions