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In this article, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist examine a Sufi shrine-based concept of affliction known as asrat (an "effect" in Hindi-Urdu, "difficulty" in Arabic) and related practices of healing in urban north India. Rather than being located in an individual body, asrat afflictions are shared, most often within a household or kinship group. Through surveys, clinical assessments, and ethnographic work, we track three different ways in which afflictions move between bodies, and the mechanisms at work in asrat healing processes. Rather than a "collectivist" concept of the psyche, we suggest that a key role of shrine-based therapeutic processes is to manage a "suspicion system," related to experiences of psychic and economic injuries and conflict between intimates and kin. Through a multi-sited research design that moves across a leading Sufi shrine, an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, and one of India's leading psychiatric facilities, we argue that within asrat -related processes, psychic vulnerabilities are addressed by "re-combining" relations through forms of inter-subjective attunement within a smaller segment of the kin group, potentially making symptoms and the burden of care and conflict more livable. We suggest that shrine-based concepts and practices may be cross-culturally significant, even for secular understandings of the inter-subjective dimensions of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although considered to be fixed sequence of computational procedures, the actual nature of algorithms emerges only in practice through its performative agency enacted within a network of human and non-human actors. In this article, I trace this agency in the everyday practices of the algorithmic system of welfare distribution, namely, the Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System (AePDS), through ethnographic fieldwork across three states in India. Conceptualising the AePDS as a programmed welfare system, I unpack its underlying assemblages to show that far from being objective technologies of governance, algorithmic sorting for targeted welfare is enacted in relation to a multitude of human actors, databases, machines, documents and shifting institutional contexts, in ways that are markedly different from its fixed computation properties. This mode of enquiry, I argue, makes the process of algorithmic enactment more transparent and comprehensible, which in turn will aid in better design and governance of such systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1995, a multimillion-dollar experiment – the Indian Ocean Experiment – discovered a dark mass of polluting air hovering above the Indian subcontinent. This mass of air was termed a cloud and found to be composed of a high amount of black carbon that was judged to be the second biggest threat to climate change after carbon-dioxide. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the life of black carbon by documenting its changing forms since the experiment. It emerges that the changing forms allow for the movement of air – smoke from traditional cookstoves and vehicular diesel emissions in India lead to the formation of the cloud – and reveal how an ethnography of air can be undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how ethnographic representations of “the village” have created links between otherwise disparate “regional ethnography traditions” over time. “The village” has served as a multivalent sign that at once works to integrate specific locales into broader scholarly narratives, and to index moments of disjuncture in the production of regionality. I make this argument with specific reference to the relationship between “Himalayan” and “South Asian” studies, as mediated by the village as both geographical and social sign. I draw upon ethnographic material from three different Himalayan contexts to illustrate how people think of the village as a set of social relations, within which they orient themselves subjectively regardless of their physical location. Such orientations can be either positive or negative, demonstrating that the village serves not only as a site of nostalgia for those who have left it, but rather as an organizing principle that may possess a range of emotional and pragmatic valences. Ultimately, I argue that today’s villages remain key sites for the production of social meaning, requiring deep anthropological engagement if we wish to understand how contemporary mobile lives themselves mediate between the universal and the particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the status in 2009 of servicing of blacks and minorities by public libraries in Great Britain. It discusses such services in the context of a 1969 research document authored by library professional Claire M. Lambert on the needs of citizens of or immigrants from India and Pakistan. Other major societal issues also are taken into account. It highlights certain observations of current conditions and it documents next steps in the process of ensuring adequate library services to minorities.