Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self

ISBN-13: 9780415563116 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 312 str.

Manuela Ciotti

Opis

Focusing on the low-caste Chamar community, this work examines how some of them abandoned their traditional polluting work, and strategically entered the upper-caste weaving profession. Located within the changing politics of the time, the book outlines human agency and its search for dignity.

Recenzje

"Ciotti convincingly stakes out the theoretical underpinnings of “retro-modernity” and carefully builds her argument in each chapter. As such, Retro-modern India makes an original and important contribution to the field and will certainly provoke and stimulate anyone with an interest in post-colonial modernity from a “subaltern” point of view." - Clarinda Still, Pacific Affairs: Volume 84, No. 4 – December 2011

Spis treści

Orthography and Transliteration. Glossary of Selected Terms. Foreword. Acknowledgements 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past 2. 'Today We Cannot Touch Anything': Reflections on the Crux of Identity and Political Economy 3. Ethnohistories Behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a Weaving Community and its Disappearance 4. 'We Used to Live like Animals': A Self- and Community-engineering Process 5. Irrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits 6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity 7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked One: Gendering Retro-modernity 8. The Politics of Indian Modernity Bibliography. About the Author. Index