Until few thousand years ago, virtually all humanity lived as hunters and gatherers. The same foragers may hold the key to some of the central questions about the human conditionsocial life, politics, economy and genderabout the possibility of living with nature, without destroying it.The intention behind this book is to make people understand how the Chenchu community has been constructed, developed and survived with their intelligence designs for thousands of years while protecting the ecol...

The present anthology The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh: A Post-colonial Perspective attempts to bring together reading of Ghoshs selected and most exquisite novels from a refreshingly different viewpoint against the background of Post-colonialism. Amitav Ghosh is unarguably one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary Indian English writers whose extra ordinary oeuvre of fiction has been a source of magical fascination and exerts a bewitching influence on the mind and heart of the lovers of lit...

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...

Environmental history in India has generated a rich literature on forests, wildlife, humananimal conflict, tribal rights and commercial degradation, displacement and development, pastoralism and desertification, famine and disease, sedentarism and mobility, wildness and civility, and the ecology versus equity debate.This reader brings together some of the best and most interesting writing on India’s ecological pasts. It looks at a variety of the country’s regions, landscapes, and arenas as se...

This is the first book-length study of the Yayoi and Kofun periods of Japan (c.600 BC–AD 700), in which the introduction of rice paddy-field farming from the Korean peninsula ignited the rapid development of social complexity and hierarchy that culminated with the formation of the ancient Japanese state. The author traces the historical trajectory of the Yayoi and Kofun periods by employing cutting-edge sociological, anthropological and archaeological theories and methods. The book reveals...

The environmental crisis is global in scope, yet contemporary environmental ethics is centered predominantly in Western philosophy and religion. Earth's Insights widens the scope of environmental ethics to include the ecological teachings embedded in non-Western worldviews. J. Baird Callicott ranges broadly, exploring the sacred texts of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the oral traditions of Polynesia, North and South America, and Austr...

Acclaimed for its unique ecosystem and Royal Bengal tigers, the mangrove islands that comprise the Sundarbans area of the Bengal delta are the setting for this pioneering anthropological work. The key question that the author explores is: what do tigers mean for the islanders of the Sundarbans? The diverse origins and current occupations of the local population produce different answers to this question – but for all, ‘the tiger question’ is a significant social marker. Far more than throu...

A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and commu...

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...

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 ...

Dalit is a self-designation for a group of people traditionally regarded as of lower class and unsuitable for making personal relationships. Dalits are a mixed population of numerous caste groups all over South Asia, and speak various languages.

The history of the Mwaghavul is a long one, documented in various forms, ranging from records of administration by the colonialist, to the documentation of archaeological discoveries by white explorers and administrators, documentation and analysis of languages, oral lore and culture by linguists and the latest series of narration and documentation of various aspects of the Mwaghavul people by students and individuals. These have not been collated into a single source of information about ...