The American Anthropology of India

Abstract

Notes

1. This is clear in work done by Adi Hastings on Sanskrit and Patrick Eisenlohr on language and the diaspora. Language has also been conceptualized more broadly as discourse with its particular features highlighted in terms of genres. For this approach, see Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills, eds., Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asia Expressive Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

2. See Kira Hall's work, in particular her publications: Kira Hall, “‘Unnatural’ Gender in Hindi,” in Marlis Hellinger and Hadumod Bussman, eds., Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002), pp. 133–62; Kira Hall, “‘Go Suck Your Husband's Sugarcane!’ Hijras and the Use of Sexual Insult,” in Anna Livia and Kira Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 430–60; Kira Hall and Veronica O'Donovan, “Shifting Gender Positions Among Hindi-speaking Hijras,” in Victoria Bergvall, Janet Bing, and Alice Freed, eds., Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 228–66. See also the historian Sumathi Ramaswamy and her book, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

3. Gregory L. Possehl. “Archaeology,” in Joseph Elder, Edward Dimock, and Einsley Embree, eds., India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars: 1947–1997 (Delhi: Manohar, 1998), pp. 139–56

4. Possehl. “Archaeology,” pp. 139–45. On Neolithic sites in Karnataka see Shaffer's most recent work: J. G. Shaffer, A. S. DuFresne, M. L. Shwashankar, and Balasubramanya, “A Preliminary Analysis of Microblades, Blade Cores and Lunates from Watgal: A Southern Neolithic Site,” Man and Environment Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), pp. 17–43; for work on Vijayanagara see Kathleen D. Morrison. Fields of Victory: Vijayanagara and the Course of Intensification (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000), Kathleen D. Morrison, “Coercion, Resistance, and Hierarchy: Local Processes and Imperial Strategies in the Vijayanagara Empire,” in Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, and Kathleen D. Morrison, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Kathleen D. Morrison and Laura L. Junker, eds., Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Long-Term Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also the work of John Fritz in collaboration with George Michell: John M. Fritz, George Michell, and M. S. Nagaraja Rao, Where Kings and Gods Meet: The Royal Centre at Vijayanagara, India (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1985) and John M. Fritz, George Michell, and John Gollings, Hampi (Delhi: India Book House, 2004).

5. Possehl, “Archaeology,” p. 140.

6. Possehl, “Archaeology,” p. 140 Jonathan Kenoyer has worked extensively in the Indus river valley and has many publications to his credit. His more recent work includes: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

7. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology of South Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

8. A few of Lukacs' many publications include: John Lukacs, “Health, Climate, and Culture in Prehistoric India: Conflicting Conclusions from Archaeology and Anthropology,” in M Taddei, ed., South Asian Archaeology (Naples: IsMEO, 1998), and John Lukac. “Hunter-gatherers, Pastoralists, and Agriculturalists in Prehistoric India: A Biocultural Perspective on Trade and Subsistence,” in John R. Lukasc, ed., The People of South Asia: The Biological Anthropology of India, Pakistan and Nepal (New York: Plenum Press, 1984).

9. Lawrence Cohen, No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family and Other Modern Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xxiii.

10. Cohen, No Aging in India, p. xvi.

11. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 3^rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

12. Joseph S. Alter, “Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 1997), pp. 275–98; E. Valentine Daniel. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Ronald Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden, “Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems,” in Kenneth David, ed., The New Wind (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), pp. 227–38.

13. Lawrence Babb, The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Frederique Apffel Marglin, “Types of Oppositions in Hindu Culture,” in John B. Carman and F. A. Marglin, ed., Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Gloria Raheja, The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

14. Susan Wadley. Struggling for Destiny in Karimpur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); J. C. Heesterman, “Caste, Village and Indian Society,” in The Inner Conflict of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); McKim Marriott, ed., Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Gloria C. Raheja, “India: Caste, Kingship and Dominance Reconsidered,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 17 (1988), pp. 497–522.

15. See the classic works by Milton B. Singer including When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger, 1980 [1972]).

16. See in particular the works by Nicholas Dirks, most recently, Nicholas Dirks, Caste of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); See C. J. Fuller, Caste Today, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) for a compilation of essays on caste that also include attention to Muslim society.

17. Wadley, “Anthropology,” p. 120.

18. Wadley, “Anthropology,” p. 120.

19. Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Owen Lynch, ed., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

20. See Charles F. Keyes and E. Valentine Daniel, eds., Karma: An Anthropological Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) on karma. For a few of the many accounts of spiritual or religious practitioners see Lawrence Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative as Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

21. Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

22. Wadley, “Anthropology,” p. 111.

23. Jacob Pandian, “The Building of Indian Railways and the Castefication of Wage Laborers in India,” Anthropology of Work Review Vol. 14, No. 1–2 (2003), pp. 13–18.

24. Dirks, Castes of Mind.

25. Gloria Raheja, “Caste, Colonialism, and the Speech of the Colonized: Entextualization and Disciplinary Control in India,” American Ethnologist Vol. 23, No. 3 (August 1996), pp. 494–513.

26. Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 15, No. 4 (November 2000), pp. 492–524.

27. Susan C. Seymour, Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

28. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

29. See Sara Dickey, “Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space, and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India,” American Ethnologist Vol. 27, No. 2 (2000), pp. 462–89; Mary Elizabeth Hancock, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Garrett Menning, “The Urban Nexus: Flows of Population, Commerce and Culture among Cities in Western India,” City and Society Vol. 11, No. 1–2 (1999), pp. 9–26; Seymour, Women, Family, and Child Care in India; Smriti Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India's High-Tech City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

30. Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, eds., Everyday Life in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

31. Erin Moore, Gender, Law, and Resistance in India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Seymour, Women, Family and Child; Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory.

32. Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, “Wild Pigs and Kings: Remembered Landscapes in Rajasthan,” American Anthropologist Vol. 99, No. 1 (1997), pp. 70–84; Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

33. Lawrence Cohen, “Toward an Anthropology of Senility: Anger, Weakness and Alzheimer's in Banaras, India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 9, No. 3 (1995), pp. 314–34; Cohen, No Aging in India.

34. Sara Lamb, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

35. Sara Lamb, “The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India,” Ethos Vol. 25, No. 3 (September 1997), pp. 279–302; Sara Lamb, “Being a Widow and Other Life Stories: the Interplay between Lives and Words,” Anthropology and Humanism Vol. 26, No. 1 (June 2001), pp. 16–34; Marriott and Inden, “Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems” and E. Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

36. Ravina Aggarwal, “Shadow Work: Women in the Marketplace in Ladakh, India,” Anthropology of Work Review Vol. 16, No. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp. 33–8.

37. Johanna Lessinger, “Work and Love: The Limits of Autonomy for Female Garment Workers in India,” Anthropology of Work Review Vol. 23, No. 1–2 (Spring and Summer 2002), pp. 13–18.

38. Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Cecilia Van Hollen, “Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Modern Birth in South India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 49–77; Gloria Raheja, Songs, Stories, Lives: Gendered Dialogues and Cultural Critique (Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003); Usha Menon, “Making Sakti: Controlling (Natural) Impurity for Female (Cultural) Power,” Ethos Vol. 30, No. 1–2 (March 2002): 140–57.

39. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, eds., Community, Gender and Violence. Subaltern Studies XI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)

40. Chatterjee and Jeganathan, Community, Gender and Violence, and Daniel, Charred Lullabies.

41. Pradeep Jeganathan, “A Space for Violence: Anthropology, Politics and the Location of a Sinhala Practice of Masculinity,” in Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, eds., Community, Gender and Violence. Subaltern Studies XI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 40.

42. Daniel, Charred Lullabies.

43. Daniel, Charred Lullabies, p. 107.

44. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

45. Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

46. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

47. See also Carol Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

48. Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Purnima Mankekar, “Entangled Spaces of Modernity: The Viewing Family, the Consuming Nation, and Television in India,” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 14, No. 2 (September 1998), pp. 32–45; Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

49. Amanda Weidman, “Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical Music in South India,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 18, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 194–232.

50. See also Susan Seizer, “Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, India,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 15, No. 2 (2000), pp. 217–59, on women in South Indian street drama.

51. Nicholas Dirks, “Bombay: 26^th International Film Festival of India,” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 11, No. 2 (1995), pp. 51–3.

52. Nancy C. Lutkehaus, “Introduction: Revisioning the Past, Re-viewing the Present,” Visual Anthropology Review: Special Section: South Asian Film, Television and Photography Vol. 2, No. 2 (September 1995), pp. 1–6; Poonam Arora, “Imperilling the Prestige of the White Woman: Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India,” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 11, No. 2 (1995), pp. 36–50.

53. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

54. Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

55. Brian Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Brian Axel, “The Context of Diaspora,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 19, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 26–60.

56. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

57. K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1st ed. 1999), 2001).

58. K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal, eds., Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy, Development and Political Action,” American Ethnologist Vol. 27, No. 2 (May 2000), pp. 431–61.

59. Shubhra Gururam, “The Forests Are Forever!” The Politics of Conservation and Use in Central Himalayas, India,” Culture and Agriculture Vol. 53 (Winter 1995/96), pp. 13–18.

60. See Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

61. Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster and New Global Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

62. Kelly D. Alley, On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Kelly D. Alley, “The Making of River Linking Plan in India: Suppressed Science and Spheres of Expert Debate,” India Review Vol. 3, No. 3 (2004), pp. 210–238.

63. Joan Mencher, “The United States, India and GM Foods,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1 (2001), pp. 31–3.

64. McKean, Divine Enterprise.

65. Mary Elizabeth Hancock, “Hindu Culture for an Indian Nation: Gender, Politics, and Elite Identity in Urban South India,” American Ethnologist Vol. 22, No. 4 (November 1995), pp. 907–26.

66. Diane P. Mines, “Hindu Nationalism, Untouchable Reform, and the Ritual Production of a South Indian Village,” American Ethnologist Vol. 29, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 58–85.

67. See Lawrence Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kim Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun: the Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); R. S. Khare, Perspectives on Islamic Law, Justice and Society (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); William Sax, The Gods at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

68. Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun.

69. Jonah Blank, Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

70. Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, “A Tale of Goddesses, Money and Other Terribly Wonderful Things: Spirit Possession, Commodity Fetishism and the Narrative of Capitalism in Rajasthan, India,” American Ethnologist Vol. 29, No. 3 (2002), pp. 602–36.

71. See also Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, “Imitation is Far More Than the Sincerest of Flattery: The Mimetic Power of Spirit Possession in Rajasthan, India,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 17, No. 1 (2002), pp. 32–64, for more on Bhat's interpretations of possession.

72. Nabokov, “Deadly Power: A Funeral to Counter Sorcery in South India,” American Ethnologist Vol. 27, No. 1 (2000), pp. 147–68.

73. Ravina Aggarwal. “At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village,” American Ethnologist Vol. 28, No. 3 (August 2001), pp. 549–73.

74. Jean M. Langford, Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

75. See also Jean M. Langford, “Ayurvedic Interiors: Person, Space and Epistem in Three Medical Practices,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 10, No. 3 (1995), pp. 330–66; Jean M. Langford, “Ayurvedic Psychotherapy: Transposed Signs, Parodied Selves,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review Vol. 21, No. 1 (1998), pp. 84–98; Jean M. Langford, “Medical Mimesis: Healing Signs of a Cosmopolitan “Quack,” American Ethnologist Vol. 26, No. 1 (1999), pp. 24–46; Jean M. Langford, “Traces of Folk Medicine in Jaunpur,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 18, No. 3 (2003), pp. 271–303.

76. Sarah Pinto, “Development without Institutions: Ersatz Medicine and the Politics of Everyday Life in Rural North India,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 19, No. 3 (August 2004), pp. 337–64.

77. Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold; Van Hollen, “Invoking Vali.”

78. Joseph S. Alter, “Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 1997), pp. 275–98.

79. Ronald Barrett, “Self-Mortification and the Stigma of Leprosy in Northern India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 216–30.

80. Jeganathan, “A Space for Violence,” p. 65.