Mini-India

Author(s):  
Philipp Zehmisch

This contribution to political anthropology, migration research, and postcolonial studies fills a gap in the hitherto under-represented scholarship on the migrant and settler society of the Andaman Islands, called ‘Mini-India’. Focusing on political, social, economic, and cultural effects of migration, the main actors of the book stem from criminalized, low-caste, landless, refugee, repatriated, Adivasi, and other backgrounds of the subcontinent and South East Asia. Settling in this ‘new world’, some underprivileged migrants achieved social mobility, while others remained disenfranchised and marginal. Employing the concept of subalternity, this ethnographic study analyses various shades of inequality that arise from communities’ material and representational access to the state. It elaborates on the political repercussions of subaltern migration in negotiations of island history, collective identity, ecological sustainability, and resource access. The book is divided into three parts: Part I, titled ‘Theory, Methodology, and the Field’ introduces the reader into subaltern theory and the Andamans as fieldwork site. Part II, titled ‘Islands of Subalternity: Migration, Place-Making, and Politics’ concentrates on the Andaman society as a multi-ethnic conglomerate of subaltern communities in which stakes of history and identity are negotiated. Part III, titled ‘Landscapes of Subalternity: An Ethnography of the Ranchis of Mini-India’ focuses on the Ranchis, one particular community of 50,000 subaltern Adivasi migrants from the Chotanagpur region. It highlights the exploitative history of Ranchi contract labour migration, which triggered specific forms of cultural and ecological appropriation as well as multi-layered strategies of resistance against domination to achieve autonomy, autarchy, and peaceful cohabitation in the margins of the state.

Commonwealth ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Melusky

Pennsylvania has a long history of failing to pass its budget by the start of the next fiscal year, often plunging the state in prolonged periods of budget impasse, and subjecting the state to a myriad of social, economic, and political consequences. This article explores the history of budget impasses in the Commonwealth, including their causes and consequences, and advances a growing trend in American politics as a potential solution to this problem—the election of more women to the General Assembly. I suggest that the addition of more female lawmakers will make the budgetary process more collegial as these political actors are prone to reach across the aisle and compromise due to patterns of socially reinforced behavioral expectations, thus bringing budgetary stalemates to a quicker resolution. The consequences of prolonged impasses on the target populations of importance to female lawmakers are explored as an impetus for engaging in this behavior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
R.P. Rama ◽  
Gillian Dooley

Gillian Dooley writes: Yasmine Gooneratne, literary scholar, novelist and poet, was born in Sri Lanka, educated there and at Cambridge, and moved to Sydney in 1972. She taught at Macquarie University for many years and has published more than 20 books and many essays and articles. Sri Lanka has always been a part of Gooneratne’s literary world. As a scholar she has done extensive and impressive research on the cultural and literary history of Ceylon, and her three novels all approach Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans in different ways. Her most Australian novel is her first, A Change of Skies, published by Pan Macmillan Australia in 1991, which concerns the migration of a Sri Lankan academic and his wife to Sydney. In November 2018 I was lucky enough to be among a group of Australian scholars who visited the historic Viharagala Estate Bungalow in Haputale, in the beautiful south-facing central highlands of Sri Lanka. The bungalow was built in 1876 and is now owned by the Gooneratne family. We held a mini-conference there, and were delighted that Yasmine Gooneratne was present for the occasion and throughout our visit. I had decided I would give a paper on Yasmine’s work and its links with both Australia and with Jane Austen, and in the course of my research I came across this fascinating interview with Dr R.P. Rama of Rajasthan University, Jaipur, published in SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in 1994 (Volume 38, no. 1). The interview was conducted in Sydney in 1994 and discusses the genesis A Change of Skies in some detail, along with a discussion of the state of postcolonial studies in Australian universities in the 1990s.Dr Rama has kindly given permission for us to reprint the interview.R.P. Rama writes: Shortly before my first visit to Australia I had read Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies during a stay at Mussorie in June 1992. The present interaction recorded here, however, took place in Sydney. It was a beautiful winter morning and Yasmine Gooneratne generously shared her reflections with me.


Antiquity ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 50 (200) ◽  
pp. 216-222
Author(s):  
Beatrice De Cardi

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-78
Author(s):  
hank shaw

Portugal has port, Spain has sherry, Sicily has Marsala –– and California has angelica. Angelica is California's original wine: The intensely sweet, fortified dessert cordial has been made in the state for more than two centuries –– primarily made from Mission grapes, first brought to California by the Spanish friars. Angelica was once drunk in vast quantities, but now fewer than a dozen vintners make angelica today. These holdouts from an earlier age are each following a personal quest for the real. For unlike port and sherry, which have strict rules about their production, angelica never gelled into something so distinct that connoisseurs can say, ““This is angelica. This is not.”” This piece looks at the history of the drink, its foggy origins in the Mission period and on through angelica's heyday and down to its degeneration into a staple of the back-alley wino set. Several current vintners are profiled, and they suggest an uncertain future for this cordial.


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 424-428
Author(s):  
Alexandra I. Vakulinskaya

This publication is devoted to one of the episodes of I. A. Ilyin’s activity in the period “between two revolutions”. Before the October revolution, the young philosopher was inspired by the events of February 1917 and devoted a lot of time to speeches and publications on the possibility of building a new order in the state. The published archive text indicates that the development of Ilyin’s doctrine “on legal consciousness” falls precisely at this tragic moment in the history of Russia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Catherine Cumming

This paper intervenes in orthodox under-standings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counter-futures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anti-capitalist politics today.  


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