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Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy? A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing \"what is happening\" and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.

Higher education is vital to India's future, creating citizens of Indian democracy, building communities and modern cities and conducting research the country needs to continue to advance. Yet, with two thirds of people of India living in rural areas and urban incomes falling below the world average, higher education faces many challenges. This book brings together experts and emerging researchers from India and the UK to discuss those challenges and to explore positive solutions. The team shine the spotlight on financing and funding, governance and regulation, sector organisation and institutional classification, equity and social inclusion, the large and poorly regulated private sector, Union-State relations in higher education, student political activism, and internationalisation.

In An Unreal Estate, Lucinda Carspecken takes an in-depth look at Lothlorien, a Southern Indiana nature sanctuary, sustainable camping ground, festival site, collective residence, and experiment in ecological building, stewardship, and organization. Carspecken notes the way fiction and reality intertwine on this piece of land and argues that examples such as Lothlorien have the power to be a force for social change. Lothlorien's organization and social norms are in sharp contrast with its surrounding communities. As a unique enclave within a larger society, it offers to the latter both an implicit critique and a cluster of alternative values and lifestyles. In addition, it has created a niche where some participants change, grow, and find empowerment in an environment that is accepting of difference-particularly in areas of religion and sexual orientation.

A grand synthesis of unprecedented scope,Literary Cultures in Historyis the first comprehensive history of the rich literary traditions of South Asia. Together these traditions are unmatched in their combination of antiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity, and are a unique resource for understanding the development of language and imagination over time. In this unparalleled volume, an international team of renowned scholars considers fifteen South Asian literary traditions-including Hindi, Indian-English, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Urdu-in their full historical and cultural variety. The volume is united by a twofold theoretical aim: to understand South Asia by looking at it through the lens of its literary cultures and to rethink the practice of literary history by incorporating non-Western categories and processes. The questions these seventeen essays ask are accordingly broad, ranging from the character of cosmopolitan and vernacular traditions to the impact of colonialism and independence, indigenous literary and aesthetic theory, and modes of performance. A sophisticated assimilation of perspectives from experts in anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, and religion, the book makes a landmark contribution to historical cultural studies and to literary theory in addition to the new perspectives it offers on what literature has meant in South Asia. (Available in South Asia from Oxford University Press--India)

This book examines the nature and implications of the increasing interaction among three secondary powers in the world: China, Russia and India. It provides an in-depth analysis of the complex and often contradictory goals underlying their emerging strategic partnerships along with an assessment of the role these partnerships play in the larger regional and global contexts. In particular, it focuses on the important region of Asia/Eurasia, where these countries seek to increase their influence and compete against the prominence of the United States. Breaking new ground in looking at the ways in which the triad of bilateral strategic partnerships affect the countries’ individual aspirations for power, status and wealth, this book argues that their attempt to develop codified, formal bilateral partnerships and trilateral ties that seek to neither antagonise nor fully embrace each other is both a challenge to peace and security and an opportunity for cooperation. It concludes by suggesting scenarios under which competitive or cooperative economic and security orders may emerge. Clearly written and thoroughly accessible, this book will be an informative text for courses on international relations, international security, foreign policy and Asian and Russian politics. 1. Unipolarity and its Implications for Asian/Eurasian Security 2. Strategic Partnerships in Asia and Eurasia 3. The Sino-Russian Partnership 4. The Indo-Russian Partnership 5. The Sino-Indian Partnership 6. Geopolitics or Geoeconomics: Will Competition Derail Cooperation? 7. Prospects for Multilateralism in Asia/Eurasia 8. What Does the Future Hold? Vidya Nadkarni is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego, US. Her research interests focus on the foreign policies of India, Russia and the US.

Why do countries go to war over disputed lands? Why do they fight even when the territories in question are economically and strategically worthless? Drawing on critical approaches to international relations, political geography, international law, and social history, and based on a close examination of the Indian experience during the twentieth century, Itty Abraham addresses these important questions and offers a new conceptualization of foreign policy as a state territorializing practice. Identifying the contested process of decolonization as the root of contemporary Asian inter-state territorial conflicts, he explores the political implications of establishing a fixed territorial homeland as a necessary starting point for both international recognition and national identity—concluding that disputed lands are important because of their intimate identification with the legitimacy of the postcolonial nation-state, rather than because of their potential for economic gains or their place in historic grievances. By treating Indian diaspora policy and geopolitical practice as exemplars of foreign policy behavior, Abraham demonstrates how their intersection offers an entirely new way of understanding India's vexed relations with Pakistan and China. This approach offers a new and productive way of thinking about foreign policy and inter-state conflicts over territory in Asia—one that is non-U.S. and non-European focused—that has a number of implications for regional security and for foreign policy practices in the contemporary postcolonial world.

One of the gravest issues facing the global community today is the threat of nuclear war. As a growing number of nations gain nuclear capabilities, the odds of nuclear conflict increase. Yet nuclear deterrence strategies remain rooted in Cold War models that do not take into account regional conflict. Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments offers an innovative theory of brokered bargaining to better understand and solve regional crises. As the world has moved away from the binational relationships that defined Cold War conflict while nuclear weapons have continued to proliferate, new types of nuclear threats have arisen. Moeed Yusuf proposes a unique approach to deterrence that takes these changing factors into account. Drawing on the history of conflict between India and Pakistan, Yusuf describes the potential for third-party intervention to avert nuclear war. This book lays out the ways regional powers behave and maneuver in response to the pressures of strong global powers. Moving beyond debates surrounding the widely accepted rational deterrence model, Yusuf offers an original perspective rooted in thoughtful analysis of recent regional nuclear conflicts. With depth and insight, Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments urges the international community to rethink its approach to nuclear deterrence.

Abbas Khiders teilweise autobiographischer Roman Der falsche Inder (2008) porträtiert die strapaziöse Reise eines irakischen Flüchtlings, dem es schließlich gelingt, eine neue Identität als Autor in Deutschland zu finden. Dieser Essay untersucht die Formen der literarischen Inszenierung von Autorschaft, die der Text vor dem Hintergrund vorherrschender migrations‐ und islamfeindlicher Stereotype in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit entwickelt. Khiders Protagonist erkämpft sich diskursive Handlungsfähigkeit nicht nur durch eine spielerische Aneignung der deutschen Literaturtradition, sondern auch durch eine Konfrontation von Stereotypisierungen und Formen kultureller Ausgrenzung, die mit Hilfe einer selbstreflexiven Ironie und kreativer Mechanismen der Umkehr funktioniert. So kann der Text Machtstrukturen offenlegen, die den Zugang zum deutschen literarischen Diskurs regulieren. Zudem werden im Roman anhand eines Geflüchteten und seiner öffentlichen Wahrnehmung Tendenzen der geschlechtlichen Diskriminierung, die den medialen Migrationsdiskurs der letzten Jahre prägten, einer kritischen Reflexion unterzogen, sodass zugleich ein Hinterfragen von in der westlichen Gesellschaft präsenten Formen von Sexismus möglich wird.

Indian cinema hasn't been as much talked about worldwide since probably the first works of Satyajit Ray which were shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the 1950s-1960s. Renewed interest for the biggest film industry in the world doesn't mean its complexity is well understood abroad or even inside India itself. Bollywood especially seems to have taken over all the other industries as if to become the only representative for Indian cinema; and Hindi cinema struggles to be known as anything else than Bollywood. Still, you'd probably have to go back to the 1970s to see, in Bombay films, such uproar and desire to give the audiences a more diverse cinema, either by renewing the song-and-dance formula, or by simply negating it. In this interview-based book, Hindi film technicians, artists and industrialists from all horizons and all age groups speak in detail about their work, and give their input on the present situation of Hindi cinema as well as its future. Whether this future will really be bright or not, one could not say; but that Hindi cinema is now living fascinating times definitely cannot be denied.