Anthropological Investigations In Contemporary India

"Within this book, readers will find insightful theoretical analyses and detailed micro-level studies that broaden our understanding of pressing contemporary issues through an anthropological lens. Each paper within the book contextualizes its findings within the larger societal framework, providing a comprehensive view of the situations being examined. This book's particular strength lies in its emphasis on decolonizing anthropological knowledge, exploring the nuances of stigma from an anthropological perspective, highlighting the significance of religion as an ethnic marker, exploring the problems and prospects of writing indigenous ethnohistory of tribes and indigenous people, illuminating food culture through an anthropological lens, examining borderland markets, and exploring the connection of biology and society within the realm of health issues."

This text explores how unresolved religious tensions, intensifying social conflicts, political control and exploitation in today's India challenge the established theory and practice of anthropology.

Explores the conceptual and ethnographic issues that tumultuous India poses to modern anthropology and sociology. Khare (anthropology, U. of Virginia) explicates the cultural sensibilities, roles, presence, and limitations of the ordinary Indian and reveals the adaptive strategies of the many "others" that constitute India from within. He also surveys approaches employed by renowned anthropologists such as M.N. Srinivas, Louis Dumont, and McKim Marriot. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Within this book, readers will find insightful theoretical analyses and detailed micro-level studies that broaden our understanding of pressing contemporary issues through an anthropological lens. Each paper within the book contextualizes its findings within the larger societal framework, providing a comprehensive view of the situations being examined. This book's particular strength lies in its emphasis on decolonizing anthropological knowledge, exploring the nuances of stigma from an anthropological perspective, highlighting the significance of religion as an ethnic marker, exploring the problems and prospects of writing indigenous ethnohistory of tribes and indigenous people, illuminating food culture through an anthropological lens, examining borderland markets, and exploring the connection of biology and society within the realm of health issues."

With reference to Karnataka, India.

The Modern Anthropology of India is an accessible textbook providing a critical overview of the ethnographic work done in India since 1947. It assesses the history of research in each region and serves as a practical and comprehensive guide to the main themes dealt with by ethnographers. It highlights key analytical concepts and paradigms that came to be of relevance in particular regions in the recent history of research in India, and which possibly gained a pan-Indian or even trans-Indian significance. Structured according to the states of the Indian union, contributors raise several key questions, including: What themes were ethnographers interested in? What are the significant ethnographic contributions? How are peoples, communities and cultural areas represented? How has the ethnographic research in the area developed? Filling a significant gap in the literature, the book is an invaluable resource to students and researchers in the field of Indian anthropology/ethnography, regional anthropology and postcolonial studies. It is also of interest to students of South Asian studies in general as it provides an extensive and critical overview of regionally based ethnographic activity undertaken in India.

This book familiarises readers with a new way to treat the subject of gender, foregrounding the real voices of women, their experiences doing ethnographic work, and their courage in sharing their stories publicly for the first time in the context of India. A useful companion to more theory-based anthropological studies, the book connects ethnographic data to what eventually becomes theories formed from the field. Chapters by women from a variety of disciplines – Anthropology, Literary and Translation studies, Political Sciences – transcend the academic boundaries between social sciences and humanities. The book shows how the researchers navigate in the field, write in ways that defy their academic life and work, and call into question their narrative voice. The book presents a space for women to reflect on their individual themes of research and at partially filling the vacuum mentioned above, the silences of women’s voices and expressions. The experiences described in the chapters differ, both along the divide of a "native" and a non-"native" fieldworker and along different disciplinary fields, but they share the experience of a long-term fieldwork in India and the need to self-reflect on the impact of this experience on the way the field is represented, on the people encountered in the field, on the way the field impacted on the fieldworker. The book is a useful presentation of how female researchers act in the field as women and scholars. Filling a gap in the existing literature of ethnographic research methods, the book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of Gender Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Anthropology and Asian Studies.