Explore the vast range of titles available.

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.

\"Behind India's high recent growth rates lies a story of societal conflict that is scarcely talked about. Across production sites, state institutions and civil society organisations, the dominant and less well-off sections of society are engaged in a protracted conflict that determines the material conditions of one quarter of the world's 'poor'. Increasingly mobile, and often engaged in multiple occupations in multiple locations, India's 'classes of labour' are highly segmented, but far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Drawing on detailed fieldwork in rural South India over more than a decade, the book uses a 'class-relational' approach that focuses on 'the poor's' iniquitous relations with others, and views class in terms of contested social relations rather than structural locations marked by particular characteristics. The book explores continuity and change amongst forms of accumulation, exploitation and domination in three interrelated arenas of class relations: labour relations, the state and civil society. Marginal gains for labour derived from structural change are contested by capital, local state institutions and state poverty reduction programmes tend to be controlled by the dominant class, and civil society organisations tend to reproduce rather than challenge the status quo. On the other hand, elements of state policy have the capacity to improve the material conditions of 'the poor' where such ends are actively pursued by labouring class organisations. It is argued that social policy currently provides the most fertile terrain for redistributing power and resources to the labouring class, and may clear the way for more fundamental transformations.\"

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered \"the recesses of the ordinary\" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.

A large-scale epigenome-wide association study identifies changes in DNA methylation associated with body mass index in blood and adipose tissue, and correlates DNA methylation sites with high risk of incident type 2 diabetes. Body fat and diabetes risk Obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes and related metabolic disorders. Genetic association studies have identified genomic loci associated with obesity, and recent studies have also suggested associations with DNA methylation. These authors report an epigenome-wide association study for body mass index (BMI), identifying an association with DNA methylation at 187 loci in blood and adipose tissue. They find that these methylation changes are secondary to adiposity and are also associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, independent of conventional risk factors. Approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide are overweight or affected by obesity, and are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and related metabolic and inflammatory disturbances 1 , 2 . Although the mechanisms linking adiposity to associated clinical conditions are poorly understood, recent studies suggest that adiposity may influence DNA methylation 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , a key regulator of gene expression and molecular phenotype 7 . Here we use epigenome-wide association to show that body mass index (BMI; a key measure of adiposity) is associated with widespread changes in DNA methylation (187 genetic loci with P  < 1 × 10 −7 , range P  = 9.2 × 10 −8 to 6.0 × 10 −46 ; n  = 10,261 samples). Genetic association analyses demonstrate that the alterations in DNA methylation are predominantly the consequence of adiposity, rather than the cause. We find that methylation loci are enriched for functional genomic features in multiple tissues ( P  < 0.05), and show that sentinel methylation markers identify gene expression signatures at 38 loci ( P  < 9.0 × 10 −6 , range P  = 5.5 × 10 −6 to 6.1 × 10 −35 , n  = 1,785 samples). The methylation loci identify genes involved in lipid and lipoprotein metabolism, substrate transport and inflammatory pathways. Finally, we show that the disturbances in DNA methylation predict future development of type 2 diabetes (relative risk per 1 standard deviation increase in methylation risk score: 2.3 (2.07–2.56); P  = 1.1 × 10 −54 ). Our results provide new insights into the biologic pathways influenced by adiposity, and may enable development of new strategies for prediction and prevention of type 2 diabetes and other adverse clinical consequences of obesity.

In the late-nineteenth century, British travelers to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands compiled wide-ranging collections of material culture for scientific instruction and personal satisfaction. Colonial Collecting and Display follows the compelling history of a particular set of such objects, tracing their physical and conceptual transformation from objects of indigenous use to accessioned objects in a museum collection in the south of England. This first study dedicated to the historical collecting and display of the Islands' material cultures develops a new analysis of colonial discourse, using a material culture-led approach to reconceptualize imperial relationships between Andamanese, Nicobarese, and British communities, both in the Bay of Bengal and on British soil. It critiques established conceptions of the act of collecting, arguing for recognition of how indigenous makers and consumers impacted upon \"British\" collection practices, and querying the notion of a homogenous British approach to material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism, and state violence have marred the Indian natio- state since its inception. These phenomena frequently intersect with prevailing forms of gendered violence complicated by caste, religion, regional identity, and class within communities. Deepti Misri shows how Partition began a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of \"\"India\"\" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. She moves beyond that formative national event, however, in order to examine other forms of gendered violence in the postcolonial life of the nation, including custodial rape, public stripping, deturbanning, and enforced disappearances. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against women and men, Misri establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what \"\"India\"\" means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and India.

The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists' adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people \"make\" place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi's engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.