Caste and power: An ethnography in West Bengal, India

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-974 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAYABATI ROY
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Influencing Factor ◽  
State Politics ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Micro Level

AbstractThis paper explores the institution of caste and its operation in a micro-level village setting of West Bengal, an Indian state, where state politics at grass roots level is vibrant with functioning local self-government and entrenched political parties. This ethnographic study reveals that caste relations and caste identities have overarching dimensions in the day-to-day politics of the study villages. Though caste almost ceases to operate in relation to strict religious strictures, under economic compulsion the division of labour largely coincides with caste division. In the cultural–ideological field, the concept of caste-hierarchy seems to continue as an influencing factor, even in the operation of leftist politics.

Land acquisition, rural protests, and the local state in China and India

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuefei Ren
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Land Acquisition ◽  
State Governments ◽  
China And India ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
Different Levels

As China and India urbanize, land acquisition by state and private actors has become highly contentious in both countries. This article compares two large-scale anti-land acquisition protests—the Wukan protest in China’s Guangdong province and the Singur protest in the Indian state of West Bengal—to examine how the subnational state partakes in land acquisition and how rural protesters engage with different levels of the state in their resistance. The comparative analysis finds that the different involvement of the subnational state in land speculation has produced different spatiality and dynamics of protests. In China, rural protesters target the bottom-level authority such as village councils, often taking on a cellular form of mobilization geographically confined to their particular villages. By comparison, in India rural protesters target the regional state governments and they engage in associational forms of mobilization by building ad hoc alliances with political parties and NGOs beyond the affected villages. Although the larger context of political regimes should be taken into account, this article shows that the scales at which the subnational state partakes in land acquisition have largely shaped the spatiality and strategies of rural protests.

Driving Social Change Through Forum Theatre: A Study of Jana Sanskriti in West Bengal, India

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-177
Author(s):  
Jharna Brahma ◽  
Vinod Pavarala ◽  
Vasuki Belavadi
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Augusto Boal ◽  
Participatory Communication ◽  
Forum Theatre ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Communication For Social Change ◽  
The Spectator

This article examines Forum Theatre as a form of participatory communication for social change. Based on an ethnographic study of Jana Sanskriti ( JS), a Forum Theatre group working for over three decades in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, this article seeks to show how this form of theatre, developed by the Brazilian activist Augusto Boal, subverts the passivity inherent in the communicator–receiver model of the dominant paradigm by activating the critical consciousness of the spectator and triggering a process of social change through dialogue and discussion. JS has been using Forum Theatre to address some of the deeply entrenched social norms in rural West Bengal, including those related to patriarchy, child marriage, domestic violence, and maternal and child health related issues, by extending Boal’s notion of the ‘spect-actor’ to encourage the spectators to become ‘spect-activists’, who then are engaged in community-level work on social change. We suggest that this form of communication is clearly bottom-up, radically participatory, community-based and led by the oppressed, as has been advocated by several scholars working on communication for social change.

scholarly journals THE STREAMYARD CYPHERS: ONLINE PLACE-MAKING WITHIN AN INDIAN HIP HOP COMMUNITY

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pradip Kiran Sarkar
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Third Place ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Internet Connections

This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West Bengal, attempted to create an online place for conducting cyphers during India’s harsh lockdowns in 2020. As an integral practice in Hip Hop culture, a rap cypher is akin to a poetry slam and typically held in physical locations where proximity between rappers is key to lyrical improvisation and competitive engagement. The Covid-19 lockdowns imposed throughout India in 2020 forced this community of Indian rappers to explore online environments for conducting the cyphers. However, due to infrastructural constraints related to latency in Internet connections, the cyphers were replaced with informal discussion sessions. These sessions were referred to as the Streamyard cyphers, owing to use of the free version of a web-enabled video-conferencing application called Streamyard. The ethnographic study revealed how the online sessions served as lively informal hangouts for members of the community, in line with several characteristics of Ray Oldenberg’s third place. However, there were other crucial aspects that did not meet the characteristics of a third place, which necessitated the explanatory power offered by the Indian social practice of the adda. The Streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant third place for the undertaking of addas amid the Covid-induced Indian lockdowns of 2020. While Oldenburg’s notion of the third place still holds relevance for the examination of informal sociality, in the Global South, its application requires augmentation with scholarly analyses of social practices in specific sociocultural contexts.

WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? COMPARING INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITY TRENDS IN ASEE AND CEEA-ACEG USING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND REVIEW OF PROCEEDINGS

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Rogalski ◽  
Eric Mikulin ◽  
Deborah Tihanyi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Activity Theory ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Cultural Historical Activity Theory ◽  
Original Question ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Historical Activity ◽  
Cultural Historical Activity

In 2018, we overheard many CEEA-AGEC members stating that they have "found their people"; this led us to wonder what makes this evolving community unique. Using cultural historical activity theory to view the proceedings of CEEA-ACEG 2004-2018 in comparison with the geographically and intellectually adjacent ASEE, we used both machine-driven (Natural Language Processing, NLP) and human-driven (literature review of the proceedings) methods. Here, we hoped to build on surveys—most recently by Nelson and Brennan (2018)—to understand, beyond what members say about themselves, what makes the CEEA-AGEC community distinct, where it has come from, and where it is going. Engaging in the two methods of data collection quickly diverted our focus from an analysis of the data themselves to the characteristics of the data in terms of cultural historical activity theory. Our preliminary findings point to some unique characteristics of machine- and human-driven results, with the former, as might be expected, focusing on the micro-level (words and language patterns) and the latter on the macro-level (ideas and concepts). NLP generated data within the realms of "community" and "division of labour" while the review of proceedings centred on "subject" and "object"; both found "instruments," although NLP with greater granularity. With this new understanding of the relative strengths of each method, we have a revised framework for addressing our original question.  

scholarly journals How can traditional livelihoods find a place in contemporary conservation politics debates in India? Understanding community perspectives in Sundarban, West Bengal

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 861 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amrita Sen ◽  
Sarmistha Pattanaik
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Integrity ◽  
Community Perspectives ◽  
Indian Sundarban ◽  
Conservation Politics ◽  
Ecological Relations ◽  
Conservation Conflict

Abstract We document the economic and socio-cultural vulnerability of a forest-dependent community inhabiting the forest fringe island of Satjelia in the Indian Sundarban. Using simple artisanal methods, they have practiced traditional livelihoods like fishing and collecting wild honey from the forests for more than a century. Despite having established cultural integrity and traditional occupations, this group is not indigenous, and are therefore treated as 'others' and 'settlers.' An ethnographic study describes these various forms of livelihoods and the ways that threatens local subsistence. We also document the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of protected area (PA) management, showing it has little or no accommodation of this community's local traditional knowledge. Finally, we ask whether there is any scope for integrating 'non-indigenous' environmental knowledge, for a more egalitarian transformation of socio ecological relations within these communities. Keywords: Conservation, conflict, indigenous, political ecology, Sundarban, traditional livelihoods

18. Political Participation

2020 ◽  
pp. 318-335
Author(s):  
Herbert Kitschelt ◽  
Philipp Rehm
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Politically Active

This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions are conducive to participation and the role of economic affluence in political participation. Finally, the chapter discusses political participation at the micro-level. It shows that both formal associations and informal social networks, configured around family and friendship ties, supplement individual capacities to engage in political participation or compensate for weak capacities, so as to boost an individual’s probability to become politically active.

Military cosmopolitanism and romantic indigeneity: Crafting claims to statehood in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198941989730
Author(s):  
Sushmita Sircar
Keyword(s):  
West Bengal ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Many

The world wars definitively changed the relations with the state of the peoples of India’s northeastern frontier. The wars were both fought on their terrain (with the invasion of the Japanese army) and led to the recruitment of people from the region to serve in the British Army. The contemporary Anglophone Indian novel documents the lingering effects of this militarization in the many insurgencies that have fragmented the region in the postcolonial era. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) depicts the Gorkhaland uprising of the 1980s in the Kalimpong district of West Bengal, which demanded a separate state, while Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood (2011) describes the Naga peoples’ traditional way of life against the backdrop of attempts to declare independence from the Indian state. In this article I argue that these novels capture how these secessionist movements use the experience of the world wars to craft a political identity based on military brotherhood to claim independence from the Indian state. These movements thus undertake a complex reworking of the valences of the figure of the “soldier”, central to so many accounts of national integrity. At the same time, reproducing the nationalist logic of the Indian state, these novels more readily recognize an “indigenous” identity based on a claim to the land as the political basis of nationhood. Hence, these novels about secessionist struggles reveal how certain narratives of nation formation become the only legitimate means for making claims for political rights and independent statehood over the course of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals A ‘model of reconciliation’? Fifty years of German–Israeli relations

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Wittlinger
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Key Aspects

This article argues that German–Israeli reconciliation after 1945 has not been as exemplary as is often suggested. Drawing on key aspects which emerge from a discussion of relevant concepts in the first part of the article – transitional justice and reconciliation – it will show that Germany’s memory culture, as evidenced in the elite discourse, has indeed developed in a way that points to a successful reconciliation between the two countries. On the other hand, however, German regret emerged only reluctantly, was by and large confined to West Germany, and took a long time to establish itself formally, with emphasis on German suffering rather than suffering caused by Germans always playing an important role in German collective memory after 1945. It will also show that at grass-roots level, reconciliation between Germany and Israel is far from unproblematic. Apart from providing a critical assessment of the reconciliation between Germany and Israel after 1945, the article contributes to current academic literature on transitional justice, reconciliation and the role of memory which suggests that even though commemoration and micro-level reconciliation might be important, the geopolitical context in which reconciliation takes place and strategic security considerations also play a significant role.

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