Putting Indian christianities into context: Biographies of christian conversion in a leprosy colony

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications - depending on one's wider social positioning - of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014

'Go on, just try some!': Meat and meaning-making among South Indian Christians

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31(1), 36-55, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00856400701874700.No abstract available

At the intersection of disability and masculinity: Exploring gender and bodily difference in India

This is the accepted version of the following article: STAPLES, J. (2011), At the intersection of disability and masculinity: exploring gender and bodily difference in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17: 545–562. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01706.x, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01706.x/abstract.Despite a conventional view that bodily impairments are necessarily interpreted as emasculating and negative, this article – drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with men affected by leprosy and by cerebral palsy (CP) in India – offers a more nuanced account of how disabled men negotiate their gendered identities. Different kinds of impairments have very specific, context-defined, meanings that, in turn, have different implications for how gender and disability might intersect. Rather than diminishing masculinity in all instances – some bodily differences, as the article demonstrates, might even be enacted as hyper-masculine – impairments are shown rather to reshape understandings of the masculine in sometimes unexpected ways. And while my informants were constrained both by ableist norms and by the biological limitations of their own bodies, ambivalence towards certain forms of masculinity also afforded them space to perform their identities more creatively, sometimes to potentially positive effect.The Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy

Personhood, agency and suicide in a neo-liberalising South India.

Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I conducted research were reduced, in popular discourse about causality, to the categories of debt, unfulfilled aspiration and desires, and romantic failures. Convincing though these explanations are, they do not help to explain why young people everywhere, faced with the same kind of existential crises, do not take their lives in comparable numbers or, indeed, why they utilise particular – and very gendered – methods of harming and/or killing themselves. Ethnographic research, however, illuminates the local specificities against which such existential crises are played out in ways that might aid our search for explanations. In this article, I explore how South Indian notions of personhood – which, in turn, lead to particular understandings and experiences of agency – might impact on how and whether people kill themselves. I also attempt to situate these local explanations of personhood and agency in the wider context of a contemporary, industrialising and, increasingly, neo-liberal India, and, in some measure, to analyse the interplay between the two

Cartographic experiment for Latin America

The author has identified the following significant results. The two experiments clearly demonstrate the practical application of the Skylab photography to update existing maps at an optimum scale of 1:100,000. The photography can even be used, by employing first order photogrammetric instruments, for updating the cultural features in 1:50,000 scale mapping. The S190A imagery has also shown itself to be most economical in preparing new photomap products over previously unmapped areas, such as Concepcion, Paraguay. These maps indicate that Skylab quality imagery is invaluable to the Latin American cartographers in their efforts to provide the mapping products required to develop their countries. In Latin America, where over 5,000 people are employed in map production and where the Latin American governments are expending over $20 million in this effort, the use of such systems to maintain existing mapping and publish new mapping over previously unmapped areas, is of great economic value and could release the conventional Latin American mapping resources to be utilized to produce large scale 1:25,000 and 1:1,000 scale mapping that is needed for specific development projects

Multi-user satellite communications system using an innovative compressive receiver

There is a need for an onboard simultaneous multi-channel demodulation system for a satellite communications system. Studies indicate that Convolve Multiply Convolve (CMC) filtering with surface acoustic wave (SAW) dispersive delay lines will eliminate the necessity of onboard satellite channelized filters of complex fourier transform processors. The reason for choosing the CMC technique is its ability to perform Fourier transformations in a shorter time with less space and power consumption than digital Fourier transform processors. Each ground terminal in this multi-users communications system is remotely located and operates independently; hence, a method of synchronizing the transmission of these users is presented which utilizes the existing Global Positioning System (GPS) system. Each ground user is equipped with a low cost ground terminal that has a synchronization subsystem attached to it. The system design of an onboard Multi-channel Receiver and Demodulator utilizes Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) as the modulation technique. This technique provides the best figure of merit, i.e., the lowest transmitter power requirement per communication channel