Description
Book SynopsisFrom Family to Police Force illuminates the production and contestation of social, familial, and national order on a South Asian borderland. In the borderland that divides Kutch, a district in the western Indian state of Gujarat, from Sindh, a southern province in Pakistan, there are many forces at work: civil and border police, the air wing of the armed forces, paramilitary forces, and various intelligence agencies that depute officers to the region. These groups are the major actors in the field of security and policing. Farhana Ibrahim offers a bird''s-eye view of these groups, drawing on long-standing anthropological engagement with the region. She observes policing on multiple levels, showing in detail that the nation-state is only one of the scales at which policing is enacted at a borderland.
Ibrahim draws on multiple sources and forms of policing structure to illuminate everyday interaction on the personal scale, bringing families and individuals
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To explore, illustrate, and advance theories about such "policing," Ibrahim draws on her fieldwork in western India's Rann of Kutch desert region, a contested borderland with Pakistan. She analyzes how patriarchs and senior wives deploy domestic secrecy against surveillance by the public, the Indian state, NGOs, and anthropologists.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
PART I: LANDSCAPES OF POLICING
1. Policing Everyday Life on a Border
2. Militarism and Everyday Peace: Gender, Labor, and Policing across "Civil-Military" Terrains
PART II: POLICING AND THE FAMILY
3. Policing Muslim Marriage: The Specter of the "Bengali" Wife
4. Blood and Water: The "Bengali" Wife and Close-Kin Marriage among Muslims
5. The Work of Belonging: Citizenship and Social Capital across the Thar Desert
Conclusion
