Böcker av Arjun Appadurai

Analysis of an agrarian society confronted with capitalism. This collection of essays on early 1980s India is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. It offers a close look at an agrarian society at the pivotal moment of its encounter with capitalist transformation and studies ideas of measurement, sociality, and independence.

India in the twenty first century is perhaps more than at any other time in its history a place of contradictions. On the one hand, it is perceived as a rising superpower, on the other, it is classified as a third world country. Indian writing in English is flourishing, but classical languages, such as Sanskrit, seem to find no takers anymore. While every Indian citizen has the right to vote during election time, Dalits have to often struggle for their rights and dignity, more than sixty years after untouchability was abolished. These issues and counter issues, and more, are discussed in this anthology by some of the most informed and insightful commentators on India: Ajit Balakrishnan, Sheldon Pollock, Gopal Guru, Ranjani Mazumdar and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, among others. Taken together, the essays in this volume illustrate why the country's achievements should be seen only in the context of its problems, in order to get a complete picture of contemporary India.

"Failure explores the deeply troubling paradox by which the more technological and financial systems fail us, the more dependent on them we become. The authors propose a theory of habitual failure by exploring crisis and divides - yet failure is not a self-evident quality. It requires a new understanding of why it is so quickly forgotten"--

Providing a conceptually framework for understanding sources of global violence, this title describes how the nation-state has grown ambivalent about minorities at the same time that minorities, because of global communication technologies and migration flows, increasingly see themselves as parts of powerful global majorities.

Acclaimed author presents a decade's research toward creating an anthropology of the future.

Although temples have been important in South Indian society and history, there have been few attempts to study them within an integrated anthropological framework. Professor Appadurai develops such a framework in this ethnohistorical case study, in which he interprets the politics of worship in the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple, a famous ancient Sri Vaisnava shrine in India.