Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power Among a Central Indian Community, 1780-1950 (SUNY Series in Hindu Studies) - Couverture souple

Dube, Saurabh

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0791436888 ISBN 13 : 9780791436882

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 1998

Synopsis

Constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community, the Satnamis of Central India.

Untouchable Pasts constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community over the last two hundred years. The Satnamis of Central India have combined the features of a caste and a sect to question and challenge the tenor of ritual power that variously defines Hinduism. At the same time, within the community, schemes of meaning and power, particularly those centering on gender, have been imbued with ambiguity and a reproduction of forms of inequality.

The book presents an interpretive account of Satnami endeavors, encounters, and experiences by combining history and anthropology, archival and field work. It addresses a clutch of theoretical questions and a range of key and inextricably bound analytical relationships in an accessible manner. Issues of caste and untouchability, sect and kinship, myths and pasts are rendered here as part of a wider dynamic between religion and power, gender and community, writing and the constitution of traditions, ritual and the making of modernities, and orality and the construction of histories.

Indeed, Untouchable Pasts brings together the perspectives and possibilities defined by three overlapping but distinct theoretical developments that have been elaborated in recent years: first, novel renderings of anthropologies and enthnographies of the historical imagination; second, critically engaged constructions of histories from below, particularly by the collective Subaltern Studies endeavor; and, finally, a conceptual emphasis on the 'everyday' as an arena for the production, negotiation, transaction, and contestations of meanings within wider networks and relationships of power.

By casting these analytical tendencies in a critical dialogue with one another, Untouchable Pasts works toward questioning some of those overarching oppositions-for example, between ritual and rationality, myth and history, tradition and modernity, and community and state-that have formed the conceptual core of several inherited traditions of social and political theory within the academy in both Western and non-Western contexts.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Saurabh Dube is Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at El Colegio de Mexico.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0791436888
• ISBN 13: 9780791436882
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 334
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible