Beyond Depoliticization? Caste,NGOs and Dalit Land Rights in Maharashtra,India

In India, Dalit mobilization for land rights and the cultivation of gaairan (grazing lands) in the last decade has attracted the attention of international civil society actors who participate in such mobilization through local non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). This article contextualizes the debate on the growth and role of NGOs by presenting the politics of formation and working of a funding‐driven network of NGOs on Dalit rights and livelihoods in India. It cautions against exaggerating the role of international civil society actors in local democratization processes, and also argues that the feared depoliticizing of public interests as a result of INGO involvement is misplaced in the case of Dalit politics.     

‘More Hateful because of its Hypocrisy’: Indians,Britain and Canadian Law in the Komagata Maru Incident of 1914

Recent remembrance and memorialisation of the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 has neglected the global and imperial implications of the incident, as well as the role that direct actions by the Indian passengers and Indians in Vancouver took against Canada’s discriminatory law. While the legal loss the passengers suffered could be regarded as simply tragic, the implications for the British Empire behind the Komagata Maru incident are more complex. More than just a legal battle between would-be Indian migrants and the Vancouver immigration authorities, the incident is a highly visible clash of two different understandings of the British imperial legal system. In contrast to any view that imperial harmony and the rights of all its subjects should supersede local concerns within the empire, Canadian immigration and legal officials instead viewed their rights as a self-governing dominion to make and pass their own laws (particularly around areas of racial desirability) as more important than issues of imperial membership, loyalty or harmony. The British government’s decision, in turn, not to contradict Canada’s eventual ruling against the Komagata Maru passengers and the decision to deport them, exposed the legal hierarchies of supposed imperial belonging, citizenship and ‘British liberty’ in the empire at a critical moment in the early twentieth century. What the incident highlighted, then, was an increasing legal distinction between settler colonies and colonies of exploitation within the empire.     

"How" Does the Bible Mean? The Bible and Dalit Liberation in India

Abstract

This essay analyses the role of the Bible in Dalit liberation in a context where Dalit theology, despite being increasingly recognized as an academic theology, hasn't been effective practically in either sustaining the Dalits in their struggles for liberation or in challenging the perpetuation of caste discrimination within the Indian churches. In the light of the Dalits' own reception of the Bible as a potential source of Dalit liberation the essay critically revisits some of the defining biblical paradigms articulated by Dalit theologians, using as its epistemological tool the tensions between "epic" and "emic" forms of theological conceptualizations, in order to identify the reasons for the lacunae between Dalit theology and its practical viability for Dalit liberation. In the light of this analysis the essay explores and offers the synoptic healing stories as a viable biblical paradigm which can animate the Dalit struggles for liberation and thus enhance the practical efficacy of Dalit liberation.     

Piot,Personhood, Place and Mobility in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs.     

3. THE QUESTION OF HISTORY IN PRECOLONIAL INDIA

This essay considers an important and enduring problem in the writing of Indian history: how do we historians approach precolonial narratives of the past? A rich and suggestive new study of South Indian modes of historiography, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has positioned itself at the center of this debate. For a variety of reasons, precolonial narratives have been demoted to the status of mere information, and genres of South Indian writing have been dismissed as showing that South Indians lacked the ability to write history and indeed lacked historical consciousness. Textures of Time responds to this picture by proposing a novel historical method for locating historical sensibility in precolonial narratives of the past. The authors ask us not to judge all textual traditions in India, especially narratives of the past, on the basis of the verifiability of facts contained in them. Rather they suggest a radical openness of the text, and they argue that a historical narrative is constituted in the act of reading itself. They do this by examining the role of genre and what they call texture in precolonial South Indian writing. This essay examines the strengths and limitations of their proposal. It does so by examining the formation of colonial archives starting in the late‐eighteenth century in order to understand the predicament of history in South Asia. Colonial archives brought about a crisis in historiographical practices in India; they not only transformed texts into raw information for the historian to then reconstruct a historical narrative, they also delegitimized precolonial modes of historiography. A better understanding of these archives puts one in a better position to assess the insights of Textures of Time, but it also helps to highlight the problems in its solution. In particular, it reveals how the book continues to use modern criteria to assess premodern works, and in this way perhaps to judge them inappropriately.     

Peace without social reconciliation? Understanding the trial of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sánchez in the wake of Guatemala’s genocide

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the legal trial against Generals Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez for genocide and crimes against humanity has evidenced the interplay between the complex factors shaping post-conflict reconstruction and social reconciliation in post-genocide Guatemala, and, ultimately, the disjunctive impact of the country’s peace process. The ‘genocide trial’ then is more than a legal process in that it represents a thermometer for Guatemala’s peace process and, ultimately, for testing the nature and stability of the post-genocide/post-conflict conjuncture. Interiorization of human rights frameworks and justice mechanisms by indigenous and human rights activists, including of the Genocide Convention, has consolidated a partial rights culture. However, the trial and the overturning of its verdict have simultaneously evidenced the instability, fragility and disjunctive nature of post-conflict peace and the continuing impact of the profound legacy of the genocide and of social authoritarianism. The article argues that while the trial has wielded broad impact within both state institutions and society, consolidating indigenous political actors, it has simultaneously fortified spoilers and evidenced indigenous collective memory as a fragmented and contested sphere.     

Seeking Personhood: Anthropological Accounts and Local Concepts in Mount Hagen,Papua New Guinea

Terms such as person, self, and individual have been deployed with varying success either as a set or separately to encompass cross-cultural contexts of human action and experience. The difficulties involved in using these terms as tools of cross-cultural analysis suggest that a concentration on indigenous terms and their applications is preferable. In the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea the most significant organizing concept in this domain is that of noman, variously glossed as mind, consciousness, intention, will, social sentiment, and understanding. The idea of the noman is thus an ontology in and of action that engages personhood with history and biography in contemporary lives among the Hagen or Melpa people. The noman is seen as in a continuous process of differentiation and change over a lifetime, and it encompasses ideas of process, incompletion/completion, relationality, individuality, character, creativity, and identity. Two different life-history narratives are used to show how people seek their personhood over time. We interpret their narratives as stories of how they attempt to achieve ‘a strong noman’. They monitor their own successes and failures in contexts of change and turbulence in their lives with reference to their overall wishes and ideals, and this corresponds to an assessment of the state of their noman.     

Habermasian Thinking on Civil Society and the Public Sphere in the Age of Globalization

ABSTRACT

In today's age of increasing globalization and the emergence of global public policy issues, the concepts of civil society, public sphere, and the legitimacy of the legal system require further analytical scrutiny and philosophical reflection. As such, this article reflects on how the renowned German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, in his Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996), addressed and reflected on the notions of civil society, the public sphere, and the legitimacy of the legal system. As Habermas admitted that barriers do exist within the civil society and the public sphere, the article examines the various ways of overcoming the barriers toward the full actualization of the civil society's emancipatory potential. The article shows its conceptual arguments through the use of empirical examples vis-à-vis the arguments of Habermas, and most importantly, that Habermasian insights need to be cast at the transnational level of democratic politics, rather than within the strict confines of political processes within the nation-state.     

Problematizing silences in intangible heritage: unsettling historical records of women in protests

Abstract

This paper addresses questions of women’s visibility in constructed histories, as well as levels of recognition concerning their participation in politics through historical narratives. In particular, historical narratives representing women in protest in the context of waterfront heritage zones associated with the shipbuilding industry are examined, based on examples of two public art projects: Strong Women of the Clydeside: Protests and Suffragettes from Govan’s Hidden Histories led by the artist t s Beall in the Govan area of Glasgow, Scotland and Shipyard is a Woman by Arteria Association and Metropolitanka in Gdansk, Poland.     

Childhoods past and present: anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices

ABSTRACT

Outdoor play is considered an essential aspect of a ‘proper childhood’. However, unsupervised outside play is declining, a decline attributed to parental anxieties about children’s safety. However what drives these anxieties and how this impacts on contemporary outdoor play is less clear. Our paper seeks to explore this through an analysis of adult narratives generated through digital map-making and forum discussion about where they played as children and where they would allow a child to play unsupervised now. Our analysis explores the nature of these narratives and pivotal moments in which adults articulated the disconnect between their own recollections of idyllic spatial freedom and the spatial restrictions they place on contemporary children. This offers a rich understanding of how parents navigate conflicting cultural imperatives on risk-avoidance and children’s rights to a ‘good’ childhood.     

‘Es honor de su nación’: Legal Rhetoric,Ethnic Alliances and the Opening of an Indigenous Convent in Colonial Oaxaca

This article examines the manner in which the caciques (noble Indians) and principales (Indian notables) from the Oaxaca region in New Spain adopted a ‘legal rhetoric’ in their quest to open a convent for noble Indian women during the eighteenth century. Through a close reading of the legal documentation produced in the petition for the convent for indigenous women in Antequera, I find that the caciques strategically used the same laws that had placed them in a subordinated place in the social hierarchy of the colony in order to negotiate certain rights and privileges. Aware of their belonging to the legally determined category of ‘Indians,’ indigenous peoples from the Valley of Oaxaca appealed specifically to the laws that had granted them a special judicial place in the colonial scheme. By referencing the Recopilación de las leyes de las Indias and several royal decrees (cédulas), the caciques appealed to colonial officials at a key historical moment, when Bourbon reforms sought to modernize all institutions, including the Catholic Church.     

‘No One Knows What He is Until He is Told’: Audience and Personhood in a Colonial African Diary

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of audience and personhood in the diary of Akinpelu Obisesan, a Yoruba man who lived in colonial Nigeria. In particular, it examines how Obisesan wrote between the genres of autobiography and biography so as to generate a sphere for self-fashioning in the colonial context. After introducing Obisesan and exploring briefly the relationship between autobiography, diary writing and the self, I show how Obisesan’s diary narrated a deeply relational form of personhood, which he both generated as a writer and consumed as a reader. The article analyses this narrative, exploring how Obisesan constituted various real and imagined audiences for his diary, while simultaneously claiming his privacy and ‘archiving himself’ into a tin trunk. In the final section of the article, I present a close reading of sections of the 1927 diary, to show how, when writing his diary, Obisesan projected multiple audiences into his text. He used these audiences as a foil for enhancing his own sense of self, thus constituting his personhood and legitimating his precarious social position in colonial society.     

Gendered-Caste Violations and the Cultural Politics of Voice in Rural Orissa,India

Despite the legal ban on untouchability over four decades ago, caste discrimination and atrocities perpetrated against ‘untouchable’ women (or Dalits) continue to be a part of the social landscape in India. Based on a decade-long partnership between a Canadian NGO, a partner Dalit/Adivasi local organization and 75 partner villages in South Orissa, this article provides a localized snapshot of the contemporary nature of caste atrocities committed against Dalit women in the Mohana administrative block. It briefly elaborates on Dalit explanations for such assaults and suggests that when it comes to addressing gendered-caste victimization, there are limits to open democratic advocacy which need to be acknowledged by activists and critical scholarship engaged with the cultural politics of ‘voice’.     

Shattered Dreams: The Longing for “Post Independent India”

For Dalits in rural India, Nehru's vision of an Indian nation-state devoid of caste prejudice stimulated dreams and hopes of a better future. As a people who regularly experienced social and economic marginalisation by the upper castes over the centuries, they saw independent India as a transformed space, one that would accommodate the needs and aspirations of all its citizens, especially the oppressed and downtrodden. By the end of the 1950s, however, such dreams had been shattered, as Dalits increasingly came to realise that they had been mostly excluded from development programs launched by the postcolonial state. Dalit exclusion from the process of nation-state building constitutes an injustice that ignores their contribution to the national project. In this paper I examine some of the narratives that were told to me by second- and third-generation Dalits. Their oral histories celebrate the Dalits' vital role in India's freedom movement and the period that followed. Pride in their contribution formed the basis of the new Dalit politics that developed in the 1980s through the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which has become an extremely powerful political force at the national level.     

On making noise: Hokkolorob and its place in Indian student movements

This article focuses on the 2014 Hokkolorob (‘Let there be noise’) movement at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the state of West Bengal, a student agitation that ultimately led to the forced resignation of a vice-chancellor after intervention by the Chief Minister of the state. This movement has passed into campus folklore, with a Wikipedia entry devoted to it signposting its distinctive cultural features, including public art and hashtag activism. However, in many ways Hokkolorob did not entirely fit the pattern of student protests at other Indian universities, not only because it achieved short-term success, drawing the wider public into openly expressed sympathy with the agitating students, but also because it eschewed party politics and opened the way for new expressions of dissent. Moreover, it drew attention to the problem of providing safe spaces on campuses to students across genders and orientations. Unique among the many upheavals in the Indian higher education landscape over the past few years, Hokkolorob needs to be understood in the context of a crisis that affects both the public university and the Indian polity.     

Breaking bored – negotiating spatial boredom and masculinity in the Volvo greaser culture

In this article I discuss how the experience of boredom becomes a vital part of the narratives and practices of a group of young greasers in a peri-urban community in Sweden. The ethnographic material originates from fieldwork carried out among the local ‘Volvo greasers’, aged between 15 and 19 years, at the local youth centre and the car park in a peri-urban community in Sweden in 2010. The aim of the article is to understand how place, personhood and social relations are intertwined in the greaser culture by introducing the concept of spatial boredom, which strives to illuminate the greasers' active engagement and negotiation with the experience of boredom. In light of this, the semantics of spatial boredom – the community's geographical placement as boring, reactive rather than active, static rather than dynamic – a symbolic link to femininity, domesticity, safety, routine and hence immanence is established. The orientation towards a ‘dangerous’, masculine-coded public space is reinforcing a split between both the feminine and the masculine and the public and the private.     

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism,neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part One: From ‘knowing’ fetus to ‘confused’ child

The inability of the child to represent his or her own interests as a legal subject (by definition), and the continued interest of the state in the child as a futurity or resource locks the child in an eternal pas de deux: the child continually approaches the possibility of ‘personhood’ but never achieves it. In the past 40 years, in western nations the child's legal personhood has been simultaneously invoked and constrained: through a growing array of persons and organizations that, as an exteriority, purport to ‘best represent the child’; and through an ever more finely gradated mapping of the child's interiority—which filters the child's voice through a range of interpretive theories, and mechanisms. In this myopic and hyperopic reading of the child, the child's voice disappears. This paper is the first of two examining the relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. In the case law explored around fetal rights and custody issues in the United States and elsewhere we find a paradoxical situation where the ‘fetus’ is granted a more authoritative voice in terms of what it ‘wants’ than is the child, whose wishes are perpetually called into question. Together these papers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual. They highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child whereby neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child mobilize their own political interests.     

Litigation against Political Organization? The Politics of Dalit Mobilization in Tamil Nadu,India

This article examines contemporary Dalit assertion in India through an ethnographic case study of a legal tool being mobilized by Tamil Nadu's lowest‐ranking Arunthathiyars in their struggle against caste‐based offences. The Arunthathiyars of western Tamil Nadu are increasingly taking recourse to the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA Act) in an attempt to bring members of higher castes to justice. The article explores how Arunthathiyars are employing the law and how their litigation is reshaping the politics of caste in this region. The authors document how a process of litigation by Arunthathiyars is countered by a politicization of caste by the dominant Gounders of the region, who recently entered electoral politics with a new caste‐based party. Even though the litigation route further antagonizes caste relations, it is argued that the PoA Act has provided Dalits with an invaluable tool to seek justice, democratize public space, and challenge the power of the dominant caste in the region. Dalit social movements, it is concluded, are more likely to be successful if they are backed by a legal weapon and accompanied by Dalits’ growing economic independence.     

The legacy of communism: difficult histories,emotions and contested narratives

Abstract

This paper considers contested and traumatic narratives, using a case study of the planned National Museum of Romanian Communism and the site of Jilava Penitentiary, a former communist prison, near Bucharest in Romania. It discusses what happened when representatives from different groups of former victims and perpetrators met together with facilitators and worked towards a shared understanding of the past to reach some consensus about how to deal with different and apparently conflicting narratives within a new museum of communism. It draws on notions of emotional communities in order to understand the role heritage plays in contested situations. It also considers the nature of transitional justice (‘Transitional justice is an approach to systematic or massive violations of human rights that both provides redress to victims and creates or enhances opportunities for the transformation of the political systems, conflicts, and other conditions that may have been at the root of the abuses’.) in this context.