Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum

2021 ◽  
pp. 227797602110682
Author(s):  
Surinder S. Jodhka
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Agrarian Studies ◽  
Land Relations ◽  
Opening Up

The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted “idealistic” conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would significantly enhance our understanding of its obvious materiality, which makes it persist in contemporary times. A widespread “blindness” towards caste in the agrarian studies and, likewise, the imaginations of caste primarily as a “religious” phenomenon have broader academic and political implications. Bringing them together would thus require a recognition and opening-up of this academic conundrum. A critical engagement with the disciplinary framings of agrarian studies and, perhaps more importantly, of caste studies is thus called for.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Quasi Experimental ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Theoretical Frame ◽  
Opening Up

In the conclusion, I come back on key issues of my analysis of Ālāol’s poetics. Whereas performance and the absence of theoretical frame recorded in treatises on grammar or poetics are defining features of the vernacular tradition, we witness attempts to describe and systematize vernacular poetics in eastern South Asia. Sanskrit played a major role in this attempt at systematizing vernacular poetics to foster connoisseurship. The domain of reference of vernacular poets was not poetics per se or rhetoric, but lyrical arts and musicology. But efforts to describe vernacular poetics also display an awareness of the importance of heteroglossia and fluidity in vernacular aesthetics in contrast with Sanskrit. The opening up of the Sanskrit episteme constituted by vernacular poetics also made possible the recourse to literary models and quasi-experimental uses of vernacular poetic idioms. Old Maithili, Avadhi, and Persian were visible components of the making of vernacular poetics in Bengal.

Bangladesh ties serve China's global strategy

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Global Strategy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
China And India ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
Maritime Silk Road ◽  
Chinese Trade ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Trade And Investment ◽  
Opening Up

Subject China-Bangladesh ties. Significance Bangladesh sits at a strategic juncture in South Asia, bordering China's main rival for power in the region, India. It is also located along the route of the Maritime Silk Road, China's project for global connectivity reaching out to Africa and Europe. Its economy is growing, opening up opportunities for Chinese trade and investment. Impacts Religious extremism within Bangladesh will be a concern for China's firms. Bangladesh will benefit from Chinese interest and rivalry between China and India. Primarily of regional concern, security flare-ups would fuel global tensions, especially regarding the impact of China's rise.

Information Technologies and Globalization

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-79
Author(s):  
Dilnawaz A. Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Global Business ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Rare Opportunity

Technology is defined as a device to compensate for human physical,psychological, and mental limitations. It is usually neutral, but can havefunctional and dysfunctional aspects based on its users’ intentions.Historically, the technological haves have justified the existence and possessionof new technologies, have publicized their own innocence andsense of responsibility in using them, and have asserted the innocuousnessof their devices without necessarily sharing all of their secrets. Concernedand helpless, the technological have-nots have resisted them and, havingsuffered their deadly devastation, have tried to obtain them at great risk tothemselves. However, the situation of information technology/-ies (IT) isdifferent and more interesting. The haves have attempted to popularizetheir use globally for commercial and other reasons. Many have-nots areembracing them wholeheartedly, while some are more cautious.One motivation behind the use of these technologies is globalization.The increasingly popularized term globalization is rather vague and complex,allowing a variety of interpretations and hidden intentions. Thehave-nots seem to see it as the West’s redoubled efforts at Westernizingthe world with all its pains, pleasures, and perversions; as achieving politicalhegemony as the sole superpower after the end of the Cold War; andas the “opening up of the globe” for commercial control on its own terms.Initially the world, especially the nations of South Asia, saw for themselvesa rare opportunity in the globalization of trade and IT. But since thecontagion has now spread, rather too fast, across the globe, the world cansee more clearly both the prospects and the problems of these two majorglobal trends. The purpose of this paper is to identify various issuesinvolved in these trends, and to discuss, in greater depth, some of them,namely, global business, the promise of technology, and the globalizationof media and culture ...

scholarly journals Queering Queer Theory in Management and Organization Studies: Notes toward queering heterosexuality

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Rumens ◽  
Eloisio Moulin de Souza ◽  
Jo Brewis
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Workplace Experience ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Principal Contribution

This article suggests new possibilities for queer theory in management and organization studies. Management and organization studies has tended to use queer theory as a conceptual resource for studying the workplace experience of ‘minorities’ such as gay men, lesbians and those identifying as bisexual or transgender, often focusing on how heteronormativity shapes the discursive constitution of sexualities and genders coded as such. This deployment is crucial and apposite but it can limit the analytical reach of queer theory, neglecting other objects of analysis like heterosexuality. Potentially, MOS queer theory scholarship could be vulnerable to criticism about overlooking queer theory as a productive site for acknowledging both heterosexuality’s coercive aspects and its non-normative forms. The principal contribution of our article is therefore twofold. First, it proposes a queering of queer theory in management and organization studies, whereby scholars are alert to and question the potential normativities that such research can produce, opening up a space for exploring how heterosexuality can be queered. Second, we show how queering heterosexuality can be another site where queer theory and politics come together in the management and organization studies field, through a shared attempt to undermine sexual and gender binaries and challenge normative social relations. The article concludes by outlining the political implications of queering heterosexuality for generating modes of organizing in which heterosexuality can be experienced as non-normative and how this might rupture and dismantle heteronormativity.

Indiscipline as Method: From Telescopes to Ventilators in Times of Covid

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Irina Turner ◽  
Siri Lamoureaux ◽  
James Merron
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Situated Approach ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
By Products

There is no unproblematic way to study things as “African”, yet an epistemologically situated approach based on concrete technological projects situated in Africa and their social and political implications offers an important account of the intersection of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and African Studies. We explore this perspective through the notion of “indiscipline” using the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project (SKA) based in South Africa as a case study through which to observe “indiscipline” as a methodological approach to technoscience at work. Indiscipline helps frame the socio-technical (by)products of astrophysics and engineering, and we present the production of ventilators for COVID-19 patients as an example of how the design of mega-science projects can become entangled with the dynamic concerns of society. Our conclusion elaborates on the politics of large technological systems, opening up a conversation on the intersection of science and society in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in African settings, using the template of experiences with the SKA and the National Ventilator Project in South Africa.

Commercial Collaboration and Critical Engagement in Food Research

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Food Research ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
Opening Up

This series of essays addresses some of the challenges that arise when academics engage in research and other forms of collaboration with food businesses. Assessing what is at stake at the interface between academia and industry, the essays explore the practical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical challenges involved when food researchers engage with commercial partners, assessing whether they risk undermining academic independence and whose interests they serve. This introductory essay is followed by four case studies from the United Kingdom and Portugal, raising questions about why these issues have emerged more sharply in Europe than elsewhere. The essays are followed by a series of commentaries from different perspectives, opening up a debate with which we hope other readers will engage.

Disappointment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarrett Zigon
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Critical Hermeneutics ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Metaphysical Humanism

For many today politics is characterized above all else by disappointment. Inspired by years of ethnographic research with the global anti-drug war movement, Disappointment addresses this disappointment by offering a framework for a politics that rises to the demand of our radical finitude. A politics that rises to the demand of radical finitude is a politics that finds its problems, antagonists, motivations, strategies, tactics, in a word, its call to action, in a world grounded in nothing other than the situations and existents that constitute it. This book takes up the challenge of offering such a framework by showing how ontological starting points have real political implications. A central argument of World-Building is that what is normally called ontology, politics, and ethics are actually three aspects or modalities of the same tradition, and therefore a critical engagement with one necessitates a critical engagement with the other two; that is, with the ontological tradition as a whole. This realization allows us to see how an alternative ontological starting point may lead to alternative political and ethical possibilities. With this as its task, Disappointment offers a critical hermeneutics of the dominant ontological tradition of our time and does so by means of both deconstruction and conceptual creativity. The politics of world-building that results seeks to move beyond metaphysical humanism and its exhausted concepts such as rights, responsibility and dignity, and begin to enact an ontology of worlds by means of such concepts as situation, dwelling, and attunement.

scholarly journals Indo-Aryan – a house divided? Evidence for the east–west Indo-Aryan divide and its significance for the study of northern South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-274
Author(s):  
Jessica K. Ivani ◽  
Netra Paudyal ◽  
John Peterson
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Asian Languages ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Central South ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Degree Of Similarity ◽  
East West

Abstract In this study, we investigate the possible presence of an east–west divide in Indo-Aryan languages suggested in previous literature (Peterson, John. 2017a. Fitting the pieces together – towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond). Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4(2). 211–257.), with the further hypothesis that this divide may be linked to the influence of the Munda languages, spoken in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Working with 217 fine-grained variables on a sample of 27 Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, we test the presence of a geographical divide within Indo-Aryan using computational methods such as cluster analysis in combination with visual statistical inference. Our results confirm the presence of a geographical divide for the whole dataset and most of the individual features. We then proceed to compute the degree of similarity between the Indo-Aryan languages and Munda, using a Bayesian alternative to a t-test. The results for most features support the claim that the languages identified in the eastern clusters are indeed more similar to Munda, thereby opening up further research scenarios for the history of this region.

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