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16 results

  • ‘Being Urban’ in the Context of Global Urbanization: The Case of India

  • Subhadra Mitra Channa
  • Journal:
    Diogenes / Volume 63 / Issue 3-4 / August 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2024, pp. 123-130
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  • Western intellectual sources have dominated the social sciences to an extent that most definitions originate from a Eurocentric meaning system; words like urban, wild, nature, and culture being no exception. This paper interrogates and makes a critical assessment of what urban may mean in a non-western context, taking Delhi, the capital of India, as an example. It demonstrates that the meaning of a phrase, ‘being urban’, can only be understood in its historical, social/cultural, and political context; that the notion of a civil society, and meaning of terms such as public and private may be contextualized in varying moral universes and value systems to mean quite different things in different contexts. Overall the paper seeks to illuminate the futility of monolithic and reductionist constructs and value of situational and ethnographically constructed meanings of social and cultural phenomena. It demonstrates that even dichotomies like urban/non-urban are fuzzy and fluid, given the actual situation of real cities and their population; that a city is not defined by structure alone but by the people who live in it.

  • 9 - Conceptualizing Bodies, Hierarchy, and Gendering across Cultures

  • from Part Two - Knowledges and Domains
  • Edited by Cecilia McCallum, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil, Silvia Posocco, Birkbeck College, University of London, Martin Fotta, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
    Published online:
    29 September 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023, pp 237-259

  • Summary

    This chapter describes the range of cognitive perceptions about the body, drawn from ethnographic narrations of various cultures, with specific emphasis on South Asia, revealing a startling plurality of views and worldviews about it. These perceptions are both informed by and influence practices related to the body, especially those of gendering, hierarchization, and sexuality and exploitation. The intersection of the way bodies are conceptualized to the power hierarchies existing in any situation illuminates how bodies are both constructed and destroyed, explaining why some bodies are considered dispensable while others are considered as precious. The modern market and the commodification of the body leads to its final disintegration and dissolution as marketable parts, dehumanizing it to an ultimate nonhumanity. All these perspectives and practices are contextualized within historical, political, and material fields of power, giving them a dynamic character. The chapter also summarizes some of the key anthropological theorizations and philosophical interrogations about the body, tracing the discourse from classical to the recent postmodern and feminist perspectives.

Gender in South Asia
  • Social Imagination and Constructed Realities
  • Subhadra Mitra Channa
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
  • This book is an examination of gender in South Asia and its intersection with other social variables like caste and class. It spans a wide canvas in terms of different social classes, ranging from elite to Dalit women of India, and takes material from ancient texts and modern media, literature and ethnographic materials forming a historical discourse. There is an appraisal of what feminism means in the Indian context and the cross-cultural construction of patriarchy that varies in its manifestations across time and space. The readers are taken on a journey that shows how gender can only be understood in its social and historical context and as a dynamic and performative concept that emerges out of both collective imaginations and social realities. The use of descriptive and narrative style makes the book readable and enjoyable to both academic and non-academic readers.