Search results for ""author kamala visweswaran""

Perspectives on Modern South Asia presents an exciting core collection of essays drawn from anthropology, literary and cultural studies, history, sociology, economics, and political science to reveal the complexities of a region that is home to a fifth of humanity. Presents an interdisciplinary overview of the origins and development of the eight nations comprising modern South Asia: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka Explores South Asia’s common cultures, languages and religions and their relationship to its ethnic and national differences Features essays that provide understandings of the central dynamics of South Asia as an important cultural, political, and economic region of the world

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Though feminist ethnography has become fairly common, the question of what the term means remains open, with many of the texts falling under this rubric relying on unexamined notions of "sisterhood" and the recovery of "lost" voices. Writing about women in India, her work with them, and the nature of anthropology itself, Kamala Visweswaran addresses this question in the essays that make up "Fictions of Feminist Ethnography". Blurring ethnographic and literary genres, these essays employ strategies from history, fiction, autobiography and biography, deconstruction, and post-colonial discourse to reveal the fictions in anthropology and the anthropology in fiction, and, in the process, to devise a new approach to writing feminist ethnography. What sets Visweswaran's work apart from previous self-reflexive feminist ethnographies, which attend to the power relations between ethnographer and subject, is her rigorous engagement with the concrete inequalities, refusals, and misunderstandings within herself and among the women she worked with in India. In each essay, she takes very specific elipses and power differentials in her fieldwork and works out their epistemological consequences. The result is a series of contextualizations of the politics of identity in the field, at "home", and in and among the activities these women were engaged in during and after the nationalist movement in India. We learn in lucid detail about the partiality of knowledge and the inevitable difficulties and violations involved in "studying" the lives of women, both inside and outside the USA. Clearly and forcefully written, this book should be of interest not only to anthropologists, but also to cultural theorists and critics, feminist scholars and writers, and other social scientists who grapple with epistemological and political issues in their fields.

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In Un/common Cultures, Kamala Visweswaran develops an incisive critique of the idea of culture at the heart of anthropology, describing how it lends itself to culturalist assumptions. She holds that the new culturalism—the idea that cultural differences are definitive, and thus divisive—produces a view of “uncommon cultures” defined by relations of conflict rather than forms of collaboration. The essays in Un/common Cultures straddle the line between an analysis of how racism works to form the idea of “uncommon cultures” and a reaffirmation of the possibilities of “common cultures,” those that enact new forms of solidarity in seeking common cause. Such “cultures in common” or “cultures of the common” also produce new intellectual formations that demand different analytic frames for understanding their emergence. By tracking the emergence and circulation of the culture concept in American anthropology and Indian and French sociology, Visweswaran offers an alternative to strictly disciplinary histories. She uses critical race theory to locate the intersection between ethnic/diaspora studies and area studies as a generative site for addressing the formation of culturalist discourses. In so doing, she interprets the work of social scientists and intellectuals such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.

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