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This article describes our transitions through three phases of a reflective cycle as a journey from the past to the future. In the descriptive phase, we delve into our past research experiences and address questions such as: What is the role of mathematics at work? In doing so, we uncovered additional venues for exploration that called for a new mode of analysis. We transition into a theory-building phase where we share our learning experiences that occurred in-the-moment. We then shift to an action oriented (reflexive) phase during which we construe personal practical theories that enable us to negotiate broader understandings of the role of mathematics at work and identify areas for future inquiry. We document our lived experiences as informed and inspired by our work with two groups of workers--bus conductors and street vendors.

It is increasingly common for advocates for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) workspace benefits and protections to argue for equitable treatment by utilizing the 'business case', or the argument that fostering a diverse and inclusive workspace promotes positive economic outcomes for multinational corporations (MNCs). Utilizing this discourse is particularly important in countries like India, where LGBTQ workers in the private sector have few to no legal protections. As such, a discourse that sutures human rights to business imperatives becomes a primary means of articulating LGBTQ precarity. In this contribution to the 'Queer Precarities' themed section, this article seeks to hold in tandem a critical analysis of this arguably neoliberal discourse of LGBTQ precarity with an ethnographic account of 'following' the business case into the diverse spacetimes in which it is performed. Drawing from ten-months of fieldwork primarily among MNCs in Bengaluru's offshore information technologies (IT) industry beginning hours before the Indian Supreme Court read-down the colonial-era anti-sodomy law Section 377, this article describes how corporate organizations responded to the ruling and how these responses, often haphazard and experimental, provided moments for various LGBTQ diversity and inclusion (D&I) advocates to make claims on global capital. In placing criticism of queer liberalism into dialogue with geographic and anthropologic inquiries into globalizing business knowledge and practice, this article argues for moving beyond queer theoretical concerns of normativity to consider moments of maneuver available to actors otherwise unequally incorporated into the global distribution of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the ‘truth’ might conflict with their own understandings and experiences? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, this article explores how family, community, and local state officials engaged in a kind of thick description that contextualized women's complaints within rural social relations and political economy. It shows how this politics of thickening often displaced women's individual experiences of violence and served to falsify their complaints. This everyday thickening bears a troubling similarity to the theory and methods of feminist activists and anthropologists, necessitating reflection on how to write ethically about gendered violence without replicating violence. Finally, this article turns attention to how some women decided to take on this politics of thickening through canny adoption of its methods and premises, eventually stretching the limits of the law and unintentionally expanding its scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The captivating tribal communities living across the length and breadth of the state of Central India and mostly in Odisha have enriched the cultural heritage of the region by their cultural diversities. Gadaba's religious life reflected through their rich folk traditions of songs, dance, music, rituals and festivals celebrated round the year adds colourful dimensions to their very existence. The amazing conglomeration of traditions, beliefs, sorrows and philosophies that together constitute and vitalize the religion of tribes has descended from antiquity and has been preserved unimpaired to the present day. Every dimension of their life covering round the year activities is intimately connected with religion and the world view associated with it. It is these aspects of their culture that give meaning and depth to their lives and solidarity to their social structure. However, in recent days many changes have been taken place in traditional religious life of Gadaba tribe. Against this backdrop, this paper has tried to explore some of that core structure of Gadaba's religious life as well as the changing dimensions of their religious manifestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the constitutive role of blame in kinship as a practice in a low‐income neighbourhood in India's capital city, Delhi. Using ethnographic data, I show how women with serious or chronic illness express blame towards kin for their failures in critical moments: for not providing care during illness, not fulfilling kinship obligations, and even for causing or exacerbating illness. As relationships rupture to reveal the underlying precariousness of kinship, women use blaming statements, accusations, and critique to leverage toeholds of power and take matters into their hands against their families' wishes. Yet even as women forge a degree of agency through blaming practices, I show that these practices can lead, paradoxically, to the repair and reconstitution of kinship. This article builds upon existing scholarship that addresses both the failure of kinship as a system of mutual support and the work of kinship repair in similar marginal contexts in north India characterized by neglect, which render women vulnerable to negative effects. My focus on blaming acts offers a new angle on this intimate terrain, illustrating how women enact the social practice of blame to reshape the dynamics and terms of kinship relations, rather than reconciling themselves to kinship failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into the heteronormative regimes of sexual morality, focusing on the experiences of gay and queer men within the locus of family. Drawing upon a phenomenological ethnography involving interviews with the Indian gay community, this study demonstrates the disciplinary power of sexual morality over queer lives. It examines the varied strategies of moral regimentation within the locus of family, including regimenting through silencing, moral dictation, and penalizing. These strategies reflect the prevailing conservative and sex-negative attitudes in Indian society, particularly patriarchal expectations toward men and the pressure for marriage, which augments familial and social burdens on gay men, resulting in emotional distress. The cumulative effects lead to gay men living double lives, presenting a socially accepted façade while repressing their authentic queer selves, indicating a guilty conscience and internalized homophobia. These experiences correlate with risky sexual behavior, substance abuse, and overall compromised mental health. This phenomenological inquiry highlights the role of the family as a locus of moral control of queer individuals and contributes to the sociological understanding of morality as a power-relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large number of people from villages in the India–Bangladesh borderlands are migrants to Indian cities, particularly to the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi. Migration from Cooch Behar, an industrially backward district in the northern part of the state of West Bengal in India sharing border with Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam, has been a regular practice as subsistence agriculture fail to provide the landless agricultural labourers continuous employment and competitive wages. This paper is based on ethnographic study in Delhi NCR and the former 'Chhit Mahals' (as the former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India were called in Bengali) in Cooch Behar district, in the period immediately following their exchange, of historically marginal migrant households whose members work in the construction industry. With the implementation of the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh and the finalisation of the India-Bangladesh land boundary, the former Chhit Mahals, that is border enclaves of Bangladesh and India, were exchanged between the two states in August 2015. The former Bangladeshi Chhit Mahals in Cooch Behar are now Indian villages, whose residents had opted for Indian citizenship. This paper explores migration from these former Chhit Mahals with a relational political economy perspective. It analyses both broader socio-cultural, economic, and political processes and interests and the migrants' own feelings which interact with migration to demonstrate how the migrant's labour value is determined at the intersection of identity, affect and the international border, with marginalisation of the migrants from the India–Bangladesh borderlands emerging as a product of layered struggles and a dynamic of continuous cultural reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutes of knowledge production, namely higher educational institutes, interpret their role in relation to engagement in various forms. This article focuses on one such collaboration between academia and a local rural community intended to address their socioeconomic problems through a technological intervention based on an integrated community engagement and asset-based community development framework. Whilst these collaborative partnerships between academic and community experts can themselves take a range of forms, this article argues that, to be effective, researchers have to deal with not just the practical issues of how the community participates in research, but also the sublime issues of knowledge and power, especially in places where colonial imprints still persist. Thus, drawing on empirical examples from two significant initiatives of Indian academia, namely the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan and the Rural Action Technology Group, this article, through a project initiative, highlights the significance of the relational dimensions to these collaborative partnerships and the significance of equitable partnership-based trust, reciprocity and mutual respect using case study analysis. Through ethnographic field experiences of a rural Indian village, it identifies what could produce epistemically just dynamics, critical to achieving transformative engagement. In doing so, the article makes a case for meaningful ways in which the efforts of the higher education institutes could be interlinked with assets of the community to help restore them to thriving and resilient communities, as witnessed in the pre-colonial rule of India. It further offers researchers and community-engagement practitioners a pragmatic way forward, along with caveats for achieving such transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Poems toward the ethnography of a moment," explores the concept of ethnography through three poems. The first poem, "Bus to Fatehpur," captures the author's experiences during fieldwork in northern India, conveying the diverse voices and concerns that emerge during a bus ride. The second poem, "In the Realm of the Saints," reflects the author's participation in a devotional singing ritual at a shrine, drawing inspiration from the work of poet Arun Kolatkar. The third poem, "To fellow merchants of experience," delves into the author's skepticism about the adequacy and value of ethnographic practice, focusing on an encounter with an elderly Dalit plaintiff. Through these poems, the author aims to provide a nuanced understanding of ethnographic moments and the complexities of human interactions. [Extracted from the article]

The paper explores the idea of development and its effects on the cultural practices of tribes in India. Taking ethnographic snapshots of tribal communities in Hatkarra Village in Chhattisgarh, argues that state-led development, forces of globalization, and acculturation processes pose a danger in the loss of cultural practices that are central to making sense of the tribal community lifeworld. The paper provides three examples to make the case, namely, education, language, and festivals. The paper is organized into three sections. Firstly, we discuss Tribes and Development in India, where we trace the conceptualization of Tribes. Secondly, we briefly give the background of the village and the research method. Lastly, three ethnographic observations are presented to support the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India" is a collection of essays edited by Laurent Pordié and Stephan Kloos that examines the transformation of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) in the Indian Himalayas. The book focuses on the everyday activities of amchis (Tibetan doctors) in remote villages and explores their interactions with villagers and local administrations. The essays provide cultural accounts of the complexities and changes happening in Tibetan medicine, as well as its influence on the Indian indigenous medical system. The volume's interdisciplinary approach engages with issues of survival and the continuation of Sowa Rigpa practice, and raises questions about the origins and sources of Tibetan medicine. [Extracted from the article]

The state of exception is classically understood as a situation devoid of laws and marked by the sovereign's absolute powers. This picture is unsettled by offering a more tenuous account of the state of siege, showing that normal laws and processes can be a constitutive dimension of modern exceptional regimes. Through an ethnography of a permanent space of exception in India, I argue that emergency regimes as forms of structural injustice are marked by affective intensities and anger directed against state power. Irom Sharmila's 16‐year hunger strike in the state of Manipur was one such affective act that challenged state authority. The police mitigated this challenge through the minutia of rules and processes targeting the protester's body. The state's legal response to the hunger strike showed that emergency powers are better understood not by the sovereign's fantasy of absolutism but as the messy affective mediation of the normal and exceptional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after their populist turn. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of its bearer. This article proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a seven-year ethnography of Indian student activism and political entry. Through combining qualitative longitudinal interviews, participant observation in North India, and discourse analysis, the article aims at contributing to three adjoining fields of inquiry: the sociology of political professionalization, the political theory of populism, and the anthropology of political becoming and subject-formation. First, I show how the embrace of populism is motivated by aspirations to gain leverage vis-à-vis political parties and group-based affiliations driving co-ethnic voting. Contra ideationalists, this case study reconsiders populism as a para-ideological attempt to become politically autonomous. Second, I argue that the claim of representative sameness at the core of any successful populist is inseparable from the one of hierarchical distinctiveness , embodied in the authoritative figure of the neta (leader). Third, I suggest that entering politics as a populist is not only about ad-hoc learning, but also about strategic unlearning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are India's democratic values? Metropolitan common sense tells us that democracy is an essentially egalitarian political form and that to be good democrats, people, wherever they are and whoever they may be, must espouse equality as a political value. In this essay I challenge this conviction by suggesting that hierarchy is a pivotal value in India's democratic life. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic work conducted across northern India and touching on the history of democratic thinking in Europe, from Aristotle to Rousseau and Bernard Manin, the essay offers comparative reflections on the nature of "democratic values" in a bid for a more ethnographically grounded theory of democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are India's democratic values? Metropolitan common sense tells us that democracy is an essentially egalitarian political form and that to be good democrats, people, wherever they are and whoever they may be, must espouse equality as a political value. In this essay I challenge this conviction by suggesting that hierarchy is a pivotal value in India's democratic life. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic work conducted across northern India and touching on the history of democratic thinking in Europe, from Aristotle to Rousseau and Bernard Manin, the essay offers comparative reflections on the nature of "democratic values" in a bid for a more ethnographically grounded theory of democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India" is a collection of critical ethnographic works that focus on Tibetan medical practice in Ladakh and the Tibetan exile community in India. The book explores the role of the amchi, or Tibetan medical physician, in the community and how Tibetan medicine shapes health resources and identities in the region. The volume also examines the historical and contemporary significance of India for Tibetan medicine, as well as the challenges faced by amchis in providing healthcare. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers in various fields, including medical anthropology, South Asian studies, and public health. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing on ethnography of one family's life with diabetes in a poor settlement in Delhi's suburbs, this paper examines the relationship between emotional structures of care and kinship in the face of chronic illness. While anthropologists have argued for a relational understanding of care and discussed how, in India, modernity and social transformations have resulted in crises of familial care, less attention has been paid to the emotional terrains of care and its difficulties as they unfold in concrete relationships over time. This paper demonstrates how emotional intensities define the possibilities, limits, and ambivalence of kin care for the chronically ill. Described as care without heart, this mode of attention implies a continuation of care labour that maintains kinship ties and holds the possibility of kin futures, but is disinvested emotionally and feels unsatisfactory. The analytic of care without heart expresses a particular mode of care by which persons navigate dominant moral regimes around gendered family responsibilities and imperatives of love in relationships, but without fully subscribing to them. Care without heart at once signifies an inadequate form of care, invokes North Indian normative moral regimes around family care responsibilities and emotions, and acknowledges the shortcomings of these regimes and norms of relatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific study of religion has steered toward materiality. Herein, researchers have highlighted the intricate role of the human body and its sensorium for perceiving objects. With this trend, a text‐based approach to religion has become less prominent. However, parallel exploratory efforts have been underreported for religious education except the limited pedagogical emphasis placed on visual aspects of religious objects. Here, an attempt to olfactorize religious education is documented. Olfactorization has been documented both as a learning strategy wherein students are encouraged to form associations between scents (real or mentally imagined) and images/words and as a means of highlighting the olfactory materiality of religious objects. The means approach paired with a "cognitive ethnographic" methodology is expected to help students to reinterpret the existing meanings of object‐centered religious traditions whereas the learning strategy approach is expected to spill over to other (nonreligious) domains of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic note-taking in the field is often imbued with emotions, shaped by power relations and influenced by participants' voice and agency. Though enough has been written about ethnography, discussions on the specific challenges of taking notes, particularly in research with children are limited. Drawing on three ethnographic field studies with children in schools in the UK, India and China, this article discusses fieldwork experiences to understand the challenges, dilemmas and complexities around note-taking in the field. Using a reflexive and intersectional lens, this article discusses the role of agency, power and emotions in the experiences of taking notes in child-centred research with children. It conceptualizes the need to understand the complexities when theories are operationalized in real-life research contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer a new concept of the "queer creative city", through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising and cultural activism. We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata. Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and community building that created a solid base for queer counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indigenous peoples of India, commonly referred to as tribes or Adivasis, have always lived in hilly, forested areas in various parts of the country, most of which are inaccessible. These tribes have been exploited, subjugated and marginalized from their forest rights, which were once part of their customary practices. This paper critically examines how tribal forest rights have been systematically violated in the post-colonial period from a subaltern perspective. It also analyzes how contemporary laws to restore tribal customary rights over the forest have failed to empower the indigenous population. To uncover the reality of this issue, this study employs anthropological methods that are important to gain a deeper understanding of tribal cultural practices and beliefs and their relationship with the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intricate interplay between mass-mediated communication, the formation of publics, and the political landscape within the culturally diverse and politically vibrant state of Tamil Nadu, located in Southern India. The study focuses on the unique context provided by the annual readers' meetings of the vernacular political satire journal, Thuglak. Employing a comprehensive political ethnography approach, the paper uncovers a complex web of interactions, ideologies, and identity formation that shape the publics of Thuglak. The paper further reveals that the political character of the journal's readership is profoundly influenced by the journal's core tenets, particularly Brahminism and Hindutva. Through a nuanced exploration of the Thuglak readers' meetings, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of the role of mass-mediated communication in shaping public sentiment and, subsequently, the political landscape in Tamil Nadu. This study serves as a testament to the powerful influence of local media in shaping the political destiny of a region and underscores the critical importance of examining such connections in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study uses data from an ethnographic study of 32 family members from six families from New Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR), India, to develop our understanding of entrepreneurial intentions in the younger members of middle-class families of India. The study identifies two critical familial influences, generational congruence and the need to maintain harmony, along with the presence of feministic values, as factors that impact the development of entrepreneurial intentions. The study further confirms that the need to conform to a social image impacts the decisions taken by family members. By highlighting the significant influence that family can have on the development of entrepreneurial intentions, this research points out gaps in how current policies and programs target entrepreneurship development in transforming economies like India. While the limited geographic scope of this study makes the findings applicable only to families in New Delhi and NCR and less generalizable overall, it further highlights the need to conduct similar studies across other parts of India, as well as other countries with similar cultural dimensions as India. The researchers suggest focussing policies towards promoting trust and confidence in entrepreneurship as a potential career option and highlighting the benefits of pursuing entrepreneurship amongst the masses by keeping in mind the cultural and geographic differences across the country. The novelty of this study lies firstly in its methodological approach, where entrepreneurial intentions are evaluated via short ethnographies. Secondly, with a strong focus on Indian family dynamics, the authors have identified novel influences that could apply to other transforming economies with similar social-cultural factors to India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seeking to explore the meaning of chronic and chronicity, the association with infertility is neither immediate nor evident. However, this paper explores this relationship by analyzing the idea of infertility in relation to chronicity. In the linkages that come forth the idea of chronic lifestyle emerging from certain ways of being and living, as well the imaginings associated with the chronic body become important nodes of exploring the relationship between infertility and chronicity. Most importantly, the role that time plays in marking the chronic state is seen to be especially potent in the practice of infertility treatment, and the narratives that emerge around its temporal inevitability. The rhetoric that marks the diagnosis and prescription of treatment is often based on the identification of the body as susceptible to reproductive decline and failure, due to the contingencies of modern living. This often translates into a more sustained involvement with ARTs, which may or may not fulfil the required desire for a child. In this paper I seek to analyse the ways in which practitioners of infertility medicine create an image of an affliction that borders on chronicity. In the process, I question the idea of both chronic diseases and chronicity by looking at how illness is imagined in narratives that IVF specialists create in public, and through the idea of a cure for infertility. By analysing data collected through ethnographic fieldwork, this paper aims to build on the idea of the chronic as inevitable within clinical discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist examine a Sufi shrine-based concept of affliction known as asrat (an "effect" in Hindi-Urdu, "difficulty" in Arabic) and related practices of healing in urban north India. Rather than being located in an individual body, asrat afflictions are shared, most often within a household or kinship group. Through surveys, clinical assessments, and ethnographic work, we track three different ways in which afflictions move between bodies, and the mechanisms at work in asrat healing processes. Rather than a "collectivist" concept of the psyche, we suggest that a key role of shrine-based therapeutic processes is to manage a "suspicion system," related to experiences of psychic and economic injuries and conflict between intimates and kin. Through a multi-sited research design that moves across a leading Sufi shrine, an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, and one of India's leading psychiatric facilities, we argue that within asrat -related processes, psychic vulnerabilities are addressed by "re-combining" relations through forms of inter-subjective attunement within a smaller segment of the kin group, potentially making symptoms and the burden of care and conflict more livable. We suggest that shrine-based concepts and practices may be cross-culturally significant, even for secular understandings of the inter-subjective dimensions of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a fourteen-month ethnographic fieldwork experience along the border of Bangladesh and India, I offer a narrative of daily challenges and uncertainties in the 'field'. Highlighting my positionality and reflexivity, I suggest that first, although a researcher may use social capital to gain access, it may raise concerns regarding the genuineness of the participant's response. Second, with careful attention, unplanned moments and spontaneous conversations can be turned into sources for valuable insight. Third, pushing the boundaries of social norms to attain a textbook example of 'gender balance' does not necessarily 'add value' to the research; instead, is likely to make it more challenging to access the same population for further research. Finally, I reaffirm that being from the same region with a similar background does not make the researcher an 'insider'. Rather, their positionality becomes more 'fluid' and constantly shifts between an insider, an outsider, both, and sometimes none. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A river is, by definition, a body of flowing water. A dam-induced water flow regulation affects its physicality and socio-political character. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.6 focused on protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems, including rivers, by 2020. In that sense, we aim to examine the political potential of water flow regulation as an urgent environmental concern in the context of a technology-based river regulatory mechanism. We employ conceptual discourses of depoliticization and repoliticization to explain how large-scale water controlling practices enact flow management and how such practices are challenged through grassroots mobilization. The article findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Omkareshwar, India, during 2017–19, on the community's everyday struggle due to erratic downstream flow in the Narmada River basin. We conclude by highlighting the need to subdue the existing depoliticized polity by an upward scaling of the repoliticization process for advancing the locals' claims to regular flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research shows that private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. A common way in which tutoring provisions are defined is with the use of the metaphor "shadow education", signifying that tutoring centres "shadow" formal schools. Despite the popularity of this metaphor in the field, how "shadowing" occurs as a process and what implications this process has for formal schooling and society have seldom been put through empirical scrutiny. To redress this gap in the literature, this article draws on the data produced through an ethnography of schooling in Dehradun (India) between 2014–15. The discussion on specific ways in which the institutional arrangement of private tutoring aligns with that of formal schooling reveals the socio-educational embeddedness of private tutoring within the mainstream schooling experience in India. The article argues that "shadowing" is not a neutral process, it is executed tactically and strategically with an aim to provide private tutoring a valued, legitimised, and competitive space in an increasingly marketised education sector. Importantly, this analysis of "shadowing" exposes problematic practices within formal schooling and suggests that by mirroring these practices in its structure, private tutoring reproduces social inequality. The insights into understanding the "shadowing process" that this article offers may be of value to the analysis of the organisational arrangements of tutoring businesses within India and in other societies. Through demonstrating that tutoring is part of everyday schooling, this article makes a case for recognising it as integral to mainstream education in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Religious minority schools are seen to take on the task of transmitting the normative image of a community, its ideology and culture. Through pedagogy and daily routine practices, schools seek to shape students' ideas of a religion and ways in which it is to be performed. This paper, based on ethnography of a Sikh school in Delhi, explores such schooling spaces and practices that attempt to establish and promote a homogenous religious identity among students. The school rules make it mandatory for Sikh students to adhere to the Sikh identity that it supports. However, interviews reveal that they interpret the religion differently from what is being projected to them through the school's pedagogy. The meaning-making process in the school is complex because while this is a religious institution, it caters to students from other faiths as well. The article argues that religious schools often overlook the diversity of beliefs among students and educational ethnographies can be helpful to explore such institutionalised practices and students' agency in identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Plantationocene is a threshold for understanding planetary change. Rather than attributing environmental transformations to the universal agency of humankind, a Plantationocene grounds the alteration of landscape in histories of colonialism and race, and takes the plantation to be a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures. This article develops a vegetal geography of a Plantationocene, engaging relations between plants and people as well as the role plants play as mediators of habitability in a landscape. It argues that such geographies influence and are underscored by the exploitation of labor, violent enclosures of land, and the quest to profit from both human and other-than-human life. Vegetal geographies are tracked in three conceptual registers: the vegetal agency of plants put into circulation by plantations, vegetal economies centered on labor power and the work plants do, as well as the vegetal politics of landscape change proceeding though an ecology of relations and the asymmetric exercise of power. This reading of a Plantationocene and its vegetal geographies brings scholarship on planetary transformations into closer dialogue with colonial history and postcolonial political economy. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author draws upon a 12-month ethnographic study of one of India's largest legal process outsourcing (LPO) firms to provide a workers' account of legal work. When LPOs came to Indian shores, they offered reasonable hours and fair pay and positioned themselves between the partnership tracks at law firms and private practice as litigators. The initial success of this model in attracting offshore projects threatened to end the monopoly of law firms--in terms of the social capital and client loyalty that law firm personnel enjoyed. While a substitution did not happen, several practices have become ubiquitous in law firms, which may have originated in the "best management practices" crucible of major LPOs. The workplace investigated was mediated by a hybrid of traditional Taylorist techniques and digital tools. The author establishes a pre-enquiry for studying legal sector labor. The author sheds light on LPO practices that may be bleeding into other parts of the legal sector so that workers across legal subsectors can observe and calibrate their organizational strategies accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As human–wildlife conflicts escalate worldwide, concepts such as tolerance and acceptance of wildlife are becoming increasingly important. Yet, contemporary conservation studies indicate a limited understanding of positive human–wildlife interactions, leading to potentially inaccurate representations of human–animal encounters. Failure to address these limitations contributes to the design and implementation of poor wildlife and landscape management plans and the dismissal of Indigenous ecological knowledge. We examined Indigenous perspectives on human–wildlife coexistence in India by drawing ethnographic evidence from Kattunayakans, a forest‐dwelling Adivasi community living in the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala. Through qualitative field study that involved interviews and transect walks inside the forests, we found that Kattunayakans displayed tolerance and acceptance of wild animals characterized as forms of deep coexistence that involves three central ideas: wild animals as rational conversing beings; wild animals as gods, teachers, and equals; and wild animals as relatives with shared origins practicing dharmam. We argue that understanding these adequately will support efforts to bring Kattunayakan perspectives into the management of India's forests and contribute to the resolution of the human–wildlife conflict more broadly. Article Impact Statement: All human–wildlife interactions are not necessarily conflicted, and policies need to go beyond conflict narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern schooling systems operate through normative and sedentary framings of childhood, within which migrant childhoods get constructed as outliers. This paper problematizes the discriminatory ways in which such a system operates. The inclusionary mechanisms adopted to 'mainstream' 'hard to reach' migrant children into formal schools do not address the fundamental spatio-temporal modalities of modern schooling. This complicates the relationship between migrant childhoods and presumed policy dichotomies such as inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, this paper foregrounds how migrant children's lives, are spatio-temporally liminal and precarious in the city. It further explores how these modalities of migrant children's lives are in discordance with the spatio-temporal framing of modern childhood and schooling. Moreover, migrant children's own experiences of schooling and socio-spatial marginalization in the city bring out the contradictions of modern schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its colonial, class‐ and caste‐based history, English in India has come to be seen as a powerful resource that opens doors for those who 'have' it and holds back those who do not. For women, English ostensibly offers various promises in addition to employment: progressiveness and 'empowerment'; and the potential for upward mobility through marriage. Yet, the conversion of English capital for English‐speaking Indian women proves to be intensely complex in practice, as many find themselves forced to navigate between shifting moral regimes attached to 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an NGO in Delhi that offers free English training to 'disadvantaged youth', this paper explores how English capital is managed by young women striving to attain middle classness through English, and how their class, caste and gender positionings are negotiated across particular time‐space configurations as they seek to become English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review provides an overview of the anthropology of love and some of the main bodies of ethnographic work and theoretical debates around studies of love. It surveys specific studies that make the politics of intimacy and love central to their analysis and that seek to make theoretical sense of its meaning and broader significance. This discussion is followed by work that draws together an example of the politicization of love in the shape of a claim around "love jihad," which has dominated recent discussions of love in India and has begun to receive anthropological attention. In conclusion, the review argues that the politics of love will need to account for the meanings, constraints, and everyday vulnerabilities through which intimate lives become entangled with and illuminate political projects of every scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I reflect on the collaborative multimodal ethnography that I conducted in Badhuli village with Aaji, a lower‐caste storyteller, singer, healer, and rice farmer. In addition to highlighting Aaji's life story and her Bhojpuri singing practice, the research project involved facilitating performative spaces for women to exchange, rehearse, film, and digitally share their vocal repertoires with other community members across gender, caste, religion, and generation. Through an analysis of multimodal ethnographic materials, this article argues that rural north Indian women's vocal traditions and performances are more than "everyday acts of resistance" (Scott 1985). Specifically, I combine Barthe's concept of "grain" of voice (1977) with recent scholarship on political activism and theories of voice and vocality (Eidsheim 2008; Schlichter 2011). I propose the new notion of "granular activism," that is, grounded in the intermingling and exchange of women's vocal traditions. I conclude by demonstrating Aaji's radically activist role in re‐imagining Bhojpuri inter‐gender and inter‐caste dynamics through vocal traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Jaspreet Singh's novel Helium is read as a historical text alongside government reports of the pogroms, media reports of the event, and oral ethnographies of survivors of 1984. Helium offers an understanding of how the memory archive challenges continued impunity of perpetrators of state violence. Impunity is embedded in the state's judicial processes, in a lack of public accountability, in forgetting, and in repetition. The survivors present a profound challenge to impunity by their refusal to accept the logic of badla or revenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transfer of Sufism as a lived tradition to the Euro-American sphere, which first began in the early twentieth century, is a notable modern development that has been the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades. Yet much of the literature on this topic to date has focused more on what has changed during the process of transfer, rather than on what has remained the same. It has also tended to prioritize context over mysticism. However, examining the main mystical doctrines and practices of the case study lineage of the Indian shaykh Azad Rasool (d. 2006), who from 1976 sought to introduce his teachings to Westerners arriving in India in search of spiritual fulfillment, in fact reveals substantial continuity with the early and pre-modern past. Such examination involved textual analysis of the primary sources of this lineage combined with multi-sited ethnography, comprised of participant observation as well as interviews, conducted primarily in Germany and the US, along with an excursion to India, among members of the two branches of this lineage between 2015 and 2020. It thus seems that shifting focus from context to mysticism itself, at least in some traditions, has the potential to also reveal much continuity in spite of changing contextual factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcohol addiction is a disease that engulfs not only addicts but also their significant others around them. The psychosocial and economic disruptions it can cause in the dependent family members' lives lay the study's background. The immediate and most significant persons facing the consequences are the spouses of addicts. They are labeled as an alcohol addict's spouse and attributed to be responsible for the addict's irresponsibility over his life and time. Al-Anon Family Groups are a Self-help model of group education for spouses and those who are affected by the alcoholism of an addict. This paper shares the results of an ethnographic study among two selected Al-Anon group meetings in Tamil Nadu, India. Al-Anon group meetings were chosen in concordance with strict adherence to anonymity. It was observed that the women participating in Al-Anon groups could develop confidence in dealing with their alcoholic husbands and select strategies to face their life situations resiliently. The study is relevant as significantly few structured programs are designed to care for the most critical caregivers of the addicts. The study calls for the attention of health givers, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists to the plight of alcoholics' wives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial introduction to the Special Theme, Sacrifice, Suffering and Hope: Education, Aspiration and Young People's Affective Orientations to the Future, we discuss the key theoretical themes (aspiration, sacrifice and affect) that underpin the papers in this collection. With geographical focus on India, Indonesia, Kenya and Bangladesh, our aim is to contribute a more ethnographically-grounded understanding of the affective orientations that emerge or become visible in the context of young people's educational experiences, and that shape and give meaning to processes of aspiration formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs) are increasingly available over the counter as a form of hormonal birth control in India. As use of ECPs is increasing over time, this paper draws on ethnographic research in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand (Northern State) to highlight the everyday material conditions under which women create narrative around choice and agency regarding these ECPs. Women viewed ECPs as better options than abortion, appreciated the sense of empowerment these provided them because they could be consumed in houses where women had limited 'space and privacy;' and finally that ECPs and their advertisements could act as 'agents of social change.' Feminist scholarship on reproduction demonstrates that choice is a form of agency that is enacted within certain constraints. Using this framework, the research here highlights how women create narratives about ideas of contraceptive choice and notions of 'empowerment' when talking about ECPs and their advertisements. In revisiting the dilemma about women's agency and choice, this paper builds on Rosalind Gill's concept of 'critical respect' to propose 'critical ethnographic respect' as an ethnographic tool to help read women's responses and respectfully contextualise the materiality from within which these narratives emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the history of sociology in India to colonial anthropology and Indology. I argue that the compulsions of post-colonial society have also made specific demands on the discursive terrain of sociology. Fundamental to the pursuit of sociological knowledge in India, I believe, was a core debate about its mode of discursive practice – specifically, a debate between particularistic and universalistic orientations. From this point of view, I re-read the history of sociology in India. In doing so, I argue that close attention to the history of sociology helps us see the extent to which foundational western approaches to historical and comparative sociology have affected the historical development of sociology in India. Ironically, this has meant that the degree of historical self-awareness in Indian sociology has been limited. Hence, I discuss the grounds for the weak historical self-awareness in terms of historical sociology in India. I conclude by discussing how a strengthened tradition of historical sociology can be a tool to revitalize the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a critical overview of the perspective that stratifies society in India into a series of different classes, resulting in the mobility of particular castes or social groups. For this purpose, the study presents ethnographic material concerning the foundation and development of a non-Brahman temple in the Tamil low-caste settlement of Line Kollai, which is in a neighbourhood close to the city of Krishnagiri. The presented ethnographic material shows how a religious folk cult has been established on the grounds of actualized and modified motives in the vernacular environment. In this line, the study analyses wider contexts of social and religious demands articulated through possession mediumship and ritual performance, culminating in the annual celebration of the wedding between Goddess Yellamā and her consort Nagaraj. The significance of attempts to integrate socio-religious activities into the network of social relationships and the system of local beliefs is explored through the narrative and practices prevalent among the participants of the cult. The presented evidence suggests that, rather than highlight a distinction in belief and practices among different social groups, it seems more appropriate to understand the social strategies within the system or relationships embodied in the power discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]