Creating a Living Goddess: Status,Sacrality and Urban Contests of Desire in Vārānas?

This paper is based on research amongst a community of marginalised Hindu women in the holy city of Vārānas? in North India. It focuses on a case study in which an abandoned baby girl, who was found on the banks of the Ganges by one of these women, subsequently could be created as a living goddess. It describes and analyses the manner in which such a religious belief was generated and sustained in this community but, more importantly, how the complex social and psychological processes through which the generation of such a belief enabled many of these marginalised women to sustain a self‐understanding—assailed by powerful rival status groups—of being imbued with power (?akti) like their goddess. Further, women were described to me, by men and by women, as being in themselves specific kinds of ?aktis. During the course of my field research, it became apparent that the ?akti of Hindu females of all ages is understood, at various levels of consciousness, to be an immense and accessible reservoir of power. Hence, this paper explores how ?akti offers others opportunities, by annexing it, to fulfill various kinds of desires.     

Great Expectations: Hindu Revival Movements in Java

Based on preliminary ethnographic research in five Javanese communities with major Hindu temples, I explore the political history and social dynamics of Hindu revivalism. I reject formalist approaches to the study of religion, including the notion of ‘syncretism’ and instead, treat the Hindu revival movements as an illustration of how social agents employ religious or secular concepts and values in their strategic responses to the particular challenges and crises they may face in a specific cultural, social, political and historical setting. Expectations of a great crisis at the dawn of a new golden age among followers of the Javanese Hindu revival movement are an expression of utopian prophesies and political hopes more widely shared among contemporary Indonesians. These expectations are set to shape the prospects of Indonesia's fledgling democracy. The paper reflects on the historical conditions under which these and similar utopian expectations and associated social movements may either incite violent conflict or serve a positive role in the creation or maintenance of a fair society.     

To whom do national days matter? A comparison of national belonging across generations and ethnic groups in the Netherlands

This paper studies to what extent participating in days for national commemoration and celebration is associated with feelings of national belonging, and to what extent this is comparable across generations and ethnic groups. Utilizing data from a national survey (N = 4,505), three major national days in the Netherlands are examined. We find that whereas participation in Queen's Day is associated with national belonging for all generations, for Remembrance Day this holds only for the generation born between 1945 and 1955, and for Liberation Day for the generations born after 1955. Moreover, for citizens with a non-Western origin, participating in national days is associated with national belonging more strongly than for citizens with a native Dutch or other Western background. These findings highlight the importance of paying attention to potential group differences in the association between participation in national days and feelings of national belonging.     

Racial categories as resources and constraints in everyday interactions: Implications for racialism and non-racialism in post-apartheid South Africa

The anti-apartheid struggle was characterized by tensions between the opposing ideologies of non-racialism (exemplified by the Freedom Charter) and racialism (exemplified by Black Consciousness). These tensions have remained prevalent in public policies and discourse, and in the writings of social scientists, in the post-apartheid period. In this paper I examine some ways in which issues of whether, when, and how race matters become visible in everyday interactions in South Africa, and what insights this may offer with respect to these ongoing tensions. Specifically, I employ an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to examine some ways in which racial categories are treated as resources for action or constraints on action. I conclude by arguing that these findings point to the contingent and situational operation of a practical non-racialism (as well as practical racialism), and thus to the achievement of these ideologies in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions.     

Discarding Park's axiom

Ethnic and racial studies fail to link up well with mainstream sociology if they assume that their subject matter is defined by the social constructs of ethnicity and race. Hindu nationalism cultivates other social constructs, yet recent studies of this movement show that sociologically it has much in common with ethnic and racial movements. The theory of collective action offers the most promising prospect for the analysis of such commonalities on a global scale.     

A cross-cultural research experience: developing an appropriate methodology that respectfully incorporates both Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems

This paper engages with the methodology being used within a research project auditing concerns and aspirations in an impoverished Indigenous community in North West Australia. The community is in the heart of booming resource industries and it symbolizes the many challenges and opportunities for contemporary Australia. The paper advances the notion that social scientific research with Indigenous communities can be positioned not just as the result of consultation with the communities but as the authorized product of those communities. Although this adds to the complexity of the governing forces that impact on researchers, it also affords new possibilities for meaningful social change. If research starts with the proposition that social scientific research with Indigenous communities can be about what communities want to know, and finding out what they have to say, we may make more progress than by asking what needs to be done.     

The Question of ‘Corruption’ in Nepal

Drawing on ethnographic material about a set of Nepalese cultural practices known as ‘nutabad —ciypabad’, ‘favouritism’, the paper attempts; first, to chart the meaning favouritism has for Nepalis in their everyday encounters with central administration and the forms these interactions take and their cultural significations; second, to examine the way the idea of favouritism is constructed by the Westernized intellectuals to mean corruption and their reasons for so doing. The key sociological concept utilized for this analysis is ‘power’, specifically its operation in the field of political ethics centring on a conflict between two opposing ideologies; one advocated by the Westernized intellectuals who are pressing for the adoption of the principle of ‘impartiality’ in government; the other being that which is inherent in the Hindu traditional mode of statecraft wherein the institution of ‘the favour’ and therefore ‘partiality’ as a value is paramount and is in accord with Hindu cultural values, generally.     

The Never Ending Dance: Islamism,Kemalism and the Power of Self‐institution in Turkey

Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I seek to sidestep these organising categories to focus on Kemalism and Islamism as rival forms of the same social imaginary signification, and not as shorthand for these polarities. Using a number of representative texts, I argue that the extravagance of Islamist resistance in Turkey post‐1980 brings to light the fantastical power of Kemalism itself, exposed as a project of the triumph of the will. This being the case, what has been written in anthropology about acts of ‘self‐institution’? The work of Nigel Rapport and Cornelius Castoriadis emphasises, in different ways, the arbitrariness and gratuity of social creation out of nothing or self‐institution. Pierre Bourdieu's work, on the other hand, is radically contrary to Rapport's in its structuralist elaboration of agency as guided action. My analysis of processes of change within both the Islamist and Republican social movements in Turkey from the early 1990s to the present seeks a temporary rapprochement, at least in this case, between Rapport's methodological individualism and Bourdieu's methodological holism.     

Governance of indigenous policy in the neo-liberal age: indigenous disadvantage and the intersecting of paternalism and neo-liberalism as a racial project

Thinking about the governance of Indigenous poverty as an economic, social and racial project, the paper offers a way of understanding the dynamics of Indigenous policy formation in Australia in the neo-liberal age as what Howard Winant first coined a racial formation. In providing this analysis, this paper sits alongside a small, but growing body of work that reveals the racialized effects of governing through poverty in the neo-liberal age.     

Hindu nationalism in the US: changing configurations of political practice

The meaning and implications of Hindu nationalist expression in the United States are different from those at home, but both are linked through transnational circuits of communication and exchange. In India, the invocation of religion summons up the unresolved debates between nationalism and social reform, and presents Hinduism as an implicitly conservative force. By contrast, in the US, Hindu religion is more self-consciously a medium of cultural reproduction. This article points to the ways in which Hindu nationalism seeks and promotes transnational affiliations even while espousing a rhetoric of insularity, cultural pride and self-sufficiency.     

Seeking Social Inventions to Improve the Transition to Adulthood

Social inventions are new ways of solving human problems. This article reports on an action research project designed to find social inventions to reduce structural lag in four programs that support the transition to adulthood of marginalized youth in Latin America. The investigators engaged youth and staff members in identifying important questions, collecting and interpreting data, and using findings to improve their practices. Their issues aligned with social setting features: activities, resources, roles, and norms. Among their social inventions were “the life project,” the role of mentor, youth responsibility, and new norms of reflection introduced by action research, which not only revealed social inventions but generated them as well. Interaction with external parties contributed to this process: the investigators, “local researchers” engaged as part of the project, participants in conferences convened for participants. Rather than recommending social inventions for adoption in other locations, we recommend using action research to generate local social inventions.     

The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva

Movements in the diaspora must perforce settle accounts with the cultural frameworks within which they operate. When the Hindu Right sets off from the shores of South Asia, it has to come to terms with its new location. In the United States, it constitutes a Yankee Hindutva – where it asserts itself in the space allowed by multiculturalism. To delink itself from its shabby heritage in the subcontinent, Yankee Hindutva adopts many, protean, forms – this to attract people from all walks of life. This article traces the protean forms of Yankee Hindutva, the many ways in which the Hindu Right enters the lives of certain South Asian Americans, whom they now call “Hindu Americans”. An analysis of the grounds for the Right lead the authors into a discussion of the patterns for fund-raising adopted by Yankee Hindutva, as well as its attempt to secure social control over Indian Americans. The authors also demonstrate the ideological and stylistic contradictions of Yankee Hindutva, this to offer some brief comments on the forces arrayed against it.     

Theory Testing in Prehistoric North America: Fruits of One of the World's Great Archeological Natural Laboratories

This paper has several interconnected goals. First and most generally, we will review the project represented by the papers in this dedicated issue and the SAA Symposium (2012) on Social Complexity and the Bow. This project centers on the ever‐stronger and broader theory testing now becoming feasible in archeology and anthropology, in this case exploiting the unique natural laboratory represented by what we refer to as the North American Neolithic transitions. Second, we will strive to synopsize the papers in this issue as opportunities to falsify two general theories of the cause of increases in social complexity associated with the North American Neolithic: warfare and social coercion theories.¹ We argue that, though much work remains to be done, the current evidence supports one of the central predictions of both these theories, that the local arrival of elite bow technology was a central driver of local transitions to increased social complexity. This conclusion, if ultimately verified, has profound implications for the possibility of general theories of history. Third, we will argue that several important details of this evidence falsify warfare theory and support (fail to falsify) social coercion theory (the authors' favored perspective). Moreover, several potential falsifications of social coercion theory are amenable to alternative interpretations, leading to new falsifiable predictions. Finally, we discuss how interactions with our colleagues in this project produced new insights into several details of the predictions of social coercion theory, improving our interpretative capacity.     

Cleanliness in a Caste-less Context: Collective Negotiations of Purity and Pollution among Indo-Fijian Hindus

Despite the near elimination of caste in Fiji, Indo-Fijian Hindus widely adhere to pollution ideologies that were once associated with caste hierarchies. In this paper, I analyse how such ideologies have been transformed from demarcating caste status to indexing Hindu identity. Examining a hotly contested community debate that took place when members of a Hindu devotional singing group in Fiji were accused of praying while being ‘unclean’, I argue that the intense local interest incited by such allegations—along with highly creative acts of adherence that many Indo-Fijian women undertake to avoid similar accusations—can illuminate largely unexamined aspects of how women collectively comply with pollution prohibitions, while simultaneously investing them with further social and moral force.     

Gene diversity for haptoglobin and transferrin classical markers among Hindu and Muslim populations of Aligarh city,India

The present paper reports the distribution of serum protein markers viz. haptoglobin and transferrin in two major groups of Aligarh city of North India. In present study we have undertaken a survey of 538 individuals belonging to eight different populations, four from the Hindu community i.e. Brahmin, Bania, Rajput and Jatav, and the rest four among the Muslim community i.e. Syed, Sheikh, Pathan and Ansari. The heterozygosity ranged from 0.2939 (Ansari) to 0.4873 (Brahmin) for haptoglobin and from 0.000 (Rajput) to 0.1498 (Pathan) for transferrin. The values of D _ST are 0.4122 and 0.4406, and that of G _ST are 0.5059 and 0.9726 for haptoglobin and transferrin markers respectively. Through F _ST test, it has been concluded that there is a high genetic differentiation of populations within Hindu and Muslim groups, though there is absence of any significant differences between these groups.     

Effects of hydrocortisone, oestradiol and progesterone on A23187-stimulated prostaglandin output from the guinea-pig uterus superfused in vitro

Hydrocortisone (10 μg/ml) had no effect on the basal outputs and A23187-stimulated outputs of PGF_2α, PGE₂ and 6-keto-PGF_1α from the Day 15 guinea-pig uterus superfused . These findings indicate that the high output of PGF_2α from the guinea-pig uterus during the last one-third of the oestrous cycle is not modulated by the adrenal glucocorticoid hormones. Progesterone (10 gmg/ml) had no effect on the A23187-induced increases in PG output from the Day 15 guinea-pig uterus. However, oestradiol (10 gmg/ml but not 1 μg/ml) significantly reduced the increases in outputs of PGF_2α, PGE₂ and 6-keto-PGF_1α induced by A23187 from the Day 15 guinea-pig uterus, without affecting basal PG outputs. The increase in uterine tone induced by A23187 in the Day 15 guinea-pig uterus was reduced by 20–50% by oestradiol (10 μg/ml). The addition of oestradiol (10 μg/ml) and progesterone together (10 gmg/ml) produced the same effects on the Day 15 guinea-pig uterus as oestradiol alone. Oestradiol (10 μg/ml) also reduced the A23187-induced increases in PG output from the Day 7 guinea-pig uterus, but did not reduce the increase in uterine tone. Oestradiol (10 gmg/ml) reduced the increases in outputs of PGF_2α, PGE₂ and 6-keto-PGF_1α induced by exogenous arachidonic acid from the Day 7 and Day 15 guinea-pig uterus. Previous studies have shown that oestradiol is not a cyclo-oxygenase inhibitor. The present findings suggest that oestradiol, at a relatively high concentration, may interfere with the access of arachidonic acid to the cyclo-oxygenase enzyme. This action of oestradiol may explain its anti-luteolytic action when administered to guinea-pigs in large doses after Day 9 of the cycle.     

Transnational Marriage: Modern Imaginings,Relational Realignments,and Persistent Inequalities

ABSTRACT

In the context of shifting cultural anchors as well as unstable global economic conditions, new practices of intimacy and sexuality may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting desires and potentials. This article offers reflection on the interface between global forces, powerful transcultural narratives, and state policies, on the one hand, and local, even individual, constructions and tactics in regard to sexuality, marriage, migration, and work, on the other. The article focuses on the life trajectory of Gudiya, an ambitious young Hindu woman who started out life with little social capital and few economic resources in a dusty corner of what was then the tiny kingdom of Nepal. Gudiya's story highlights the ways in which she has engaged in relational realignments aimed at bringing her closer to the life she imagines, even as she has encountered new and persistent forms of inequality both local and transnational in scale.     

Cogealing divinity: time, worship and kinship in South Indian Hinduism

Daily worship in Hindu temples is characterized by regular repetition. This article juxtaposes iconography and mythology; field data on worship in a Murukan temple in Kalugumalai, South India; and analytic concepts from western and Indian metaphysics, to examine what Gell termed the 'ritual manipulation of time'. In Hindu cosmology, the materialization of divinity – a prerequisite for worship – is inseparably linked not only to the emergence of time but also to the devolution of divinity into gendered forms. Because gender differences play a central role in iconography, mythology and worship, Hinduism provides a rich cultural resource for debating the morality and practice of human kinship, sexuality and procreation. Not only are there significant homologies between human and divine kinship behaviour, but human marriage patterns in South India display the same blend of repetitive yet changing oscillation as do daily and annual temple liturgies.     

Development of the HKHbios: a new biotic score to assess the river quality in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya

Within the ASSESS-HKH project (Development of an Assessment System to Evaluate the Ecological Status of Rivers in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region—a research project funded by the European Union; contract number: INCO-CT-2005-003659) a benthic invertebrate-based scoring system (HKHbios; Hindu Kush-Himalayan biotic score) was developed. The development was based on multi-habitat samples from 198 sampling sites located in five ecoregions and five Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan) taken in two different seasons (pre- and post-monsoon). Environmental and biological screening data were used to select macro-invertebrates as indicators for the ecological river quality. Taxa scores were assigned based on the range and distribution patterns of taxa amongst different degrees of impact and on available autecological information. In total, 199 taxa were scored for the HKHbios, which is calculated a weighted average score per taxon (ASPT). The range of the index values under different degrees of stress was evaluated and a five-class quality assessment system was generated for each ecoregion. Correlation analysis between the HKHbios, 38 selected environmental parameters and complex PCA gradients were used to test the response of the HKHbios to different kinds of impact.     

Living conditions and the health of two social groups inhabiting a squatter settlement in Calcutta, India

Squatter dwellers are found in almost all the Third World countries. Poor living conditions are the characteristic features of all the squatter settlements. Again, poor living conditions are also associated with the health condition of the squatter dwellers. In the present study an attempt has been made to compare and contrast the living condition of two social groups (Hindu and Muslim) inhabiting a squatter settlement in Calcutta, India. The results show that the overall living condition of the Muslim is worse than that of the Hindu. The morbidity pattern is also worse in the Muslim than in the Hindu.