They called it the Cold War. For most of the world, it burned white-hot.While the superpowers never fired directly at each other, millions died in their name. From the rice paddies of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan, from the jungles of Angola to the villages of Central America, the United States and Soviet Union fought a ruthless global competition not with their own soldiers, but through proxies, puppets, and populations caught in the crossfire.

In most globalizing economies, workers engaged in the informal sector occupy the lowest rungs of society. This book examines one such group—stone quarry workers located beyond the expanding rim of south Delhi and beneath the radar of effective law and policy. Drawing upon extensive case studies and personal narratives of this labouring class, Talib focuses on their inner world and interprets their life stories. He records the dwindling oral tradition of these people and brings to the fore ...

Red Tape presents a major new theory of the state developed by the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence. Every year this violence kills between two and three million people, especially women and girls, and lower-caste and indigenous peoples. Yet India's poor are not disenfranchis...

The subject of discussion in this book is the philosophy of welfare Economics. The collective choice and the subjects of freedom through development are discussed in welfare economics. Inequality is to be reduced and basal equality has to be evolved to aid human welfare. The entitlement approach is the only solution for poverty and famine. All four subjects are woven in philosophical thought by Dr.Amartya Sen for the wellbeing of people. The book is a humble attempt at dealing with the sub...

The claim is frequently made on behalf of African moral beliefs and practices that they do not objectify and exploit nature and natural existents like Western ethics does. This book investigates whether this is correct and what kind of status is reserved for other-than-human animals in African ethics.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam (the Enlightenment Movement), considered to be among the most successful mass literacy movements in recent history. In The Light o...

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive ...

In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy.Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste r...

Every system of education must have an aim. Without aim, education is meaningless. The aim of education is directly related with the aim of life and the aim of life is always dependent on the philosophy that prevails. It is philosophy which determines whether the aim of education should be moral perfection or intellectual development, whether education should be vocational or liberal.

Over the course of the last twenty-five years, Tom O’Neill has traveled frequently to Kathmandu and the Helambu region of Nepal to undertake ethnographic fieldwork with the Yolmo business owners and carpet weavers of the area. The Heart of Helambu is an evocative and touching account of his experiences working in Nepal during those turbulent times.In his autoethnographic memoir, O’Neill reflects on the complex relationships he developed with his research participa...

Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere....

The first volume of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India brings to the reader the journey undertaken in 2010, by a group of visionaries led by G. N. Devy to document the languages of India as they existed then. The aim of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India was to document these languages, spoken in India’s remotest corners. India’s towns and cities too have found a voice in this survey. What this journey did was to bring a groundswell of support from people from all walks of life, lea...