Search

This paper, based on my doctoral ethnographic research amongst the Miya community in one of the chars of Western Assam, shows how a particular category of identity documents shape their subjectivities, experiences, and aspirations. I focus on the identity documents which have errors, like mistakes in names, dates of birth or addresses, and badly angled photos. I refer to them as thin documents. Because of the thin documents, the Miyas find it difficult to assert formal citizenship rights, which they could normally assert based on accurate documentation. For the thin documents to help prove the Miyas' citizenship, they must be further supported by an additional set of documents. The process questions the Miya's formal citizenship rights. I present narratives of the Miya people living with thin documents to illustrate how the materiality of the identity document binds the Miya people to a state of liminal citizenship. I ask: what do these errors in the identity document or thin documents tell us about citizenship, particularly liminal citizenship with reference to the Miya community of Assam? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra , Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and "low"-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the experiences of the world's largest all‐women community health workforce through the lens of liminality. Originally used to describe transition from one state to the other, the concept of liminality in the study of work and organizations can frame workers' experiences of being in‐between established structures and roles in varying degrees, times, and/or places. India's ASHAs, or Accredited Social Health Activists, are community women at the frontlines of the state's health care provisioning. But the state does not categorize them as workers or employees. ASHAs are considered volunteers. Instead of salaries, they are paid task‐based incentives. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 80 interviews, I find that ASHAs' liminal occupational status as 'paid volunteers' produces conditions of chronic underpayment and control for them, further lowering their already low wages. This has implications for how we understand the gender wage gap. I argue that we need to consider not just how much women are paid, but how the payment is structured, and how that places marginalized women workers in relation to others in the workplace. Moving beyond whether liminality is a negative or positive experience, future research should delineate the conditions under which liminality is negative or positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baheliya, a nomadic tribe, were confined on the outskirts of a village in Madhya Pradesh, India due to the sudden lockdown announced by the government. How does the lockdown impact the nomad community? Using the lens of liminality, this paper details the experience of the community as they struggle between a detached past and an uncertain future. It describes the features of a liminal phase; namely, freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity as experienced by the members from the Baheliya community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the refugee journeys of Hindu Sindhi women who were displaced during the 1947 Partition, and the continuing sense of liminality, or 'in-between-ness', engendered by their displacement. Refugee journeys are most often framed as a transformative, connective phase between homeland and hostland. However, in these life narratives, the journey did not emerge as an 'in-between' connective phase but instead stretched beyond arrival and settlement in India. This article thus proposes the concept of 'indeterminate' liminality for the protracted refugee journey, through a focus on its spatial and temporal aspects. The idea of journey emerges as a scaffolding for these women's life narratives, as a series of multiple movements and claims to home spaces as they navigated gendered threats and uncertainties. The connection and intersections between past and present in their life narratives demonstrate how the liminal experience is not temporally bound between departure and arrival but extends across the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women entrepreneurship literature has unveiled the gendered assumptions of entrepreneurship. More recently, critical woman entrepreneurship literature is increasingly focusing on the neoliberal discourses in women entrepreneurship. What remains relatively under‐explored is how women entrepreneurs experience the tensions amidst neoliberal and gendered experiences especially in the context of the Global South. Based on the narratives of middle to upper‐middle‐class women entrepreneurs in India, I find that being middle to upper‐middle‐class, women entrepreneurs shared a sense of attaining a neoliberal agency through entrepreneurship, so much so that they ignored, denied, or naturalized the gendered constraints in entrepreneurship. However, soon their accounts reflected an underlying tension as they admitted facing gendered constraints while previously denying them. I contribute to the literature of women entrepreneurship by theorizing the conflicting narratives of women entrepreneurs using the concept of liminality. In doing so, I extend the concept of liminality as an in‐between position of neoliberal and gendered experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how postmemory becomes a liminal space in itself, giving birth to hyphenated identities who oscillate within the realms of this liminality. Liminal spaces are situated in the transformative bisection of the before and the after. Studying the liminal space where true memory is forgotten and a new-fangled postmemory is generated gives an insight into the minds and patterns of the collective subject. Oftentimes, such an act of forgetfulness may be forced upon the collective subject. Governments alter memory narratives, completely erasing or exponentially disfiguring them to meet their agenda. Even the hyphenated collective subject itself indulges in self-imposed forgetfulness to nullify the traumatic experiences it faces, or once faced. It willingly otherizes that which it possesses, consequently romanticizing that which it lacks. During both the Indian partition and the Bangladeshi genocide, millions of refugees flooded into India. Their progenies who grew up in India were treated with promises and visions of a utopian land beyond the borders--a land from which they had had to flee. These second-generation immigrants faced "a dramatic loss of identity and meaning" because of the cultural trauma they encountered through postmemory narratives. Stuck within this chaotic liminal space, they were forced to acknowledge both the romanticized identity that was being imposed upon them and the lacking other that they formed a part of. Narratives of postmemory passed on by the original hyphenated collective subject therefore led to the formation of another hyphenated identity, those forever stuck in a sempiternal liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incarceration is a traumatic life experience for both convicted and non-convicted individuals and life in prison is not easy to get through. However, prison administrations often establish different avenues for the prisoners to help them navigate through their incarceration. One such avenue is prison libraries. This study explores the influence of the prison library in the lives of eight incarcerated individuals, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The study is based on the concept of the 'whole person librarianship' while using a phenomenological approach. The analysis resulted in the emergence of three broad themes: 'Coming to term with incarceration', 'Library, a ray of hope' and 'Reinventing self through books'. The study expands our understanding of how the prison library can be a place that reduces stress and increases positive mental health by serving the 'whole person'. Furthermore, it reduces stress and anxiety related to the state of liminality created by incarceration and gives inmates a purpose beyond prison. Thus, it helps them in making meaning of their situation, being mindful of themselves and their surroundings, healing them in the process, and supports their well-being. The findings suggest that books help the inmates to navigate their lives during incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research explored the social representations of the 'vegetative state' across different cultural (India, Italy, and the UK) and social milieus (left‐leaning, right‐leaning, and religious/tabloid newspapers). The aim was to discover how public discourse engages liminality between life and death. Qualitative and quantitative text analyses were conducted on news headlines and full‐texts from British (n = 300), Indian (n = 300), and Italian (n = 300) newspapers published between January 1990 and June 2019. Our study shows three results: (a) the vegetative state is a potentially global issue that remains discussed with local timing and characteristics; (b) it is commonly represented in eight frames of different resonance across cultural milieus; (c) the news flows are organised on different dimensions (quality, political, and ideological). Results shed light on how liminality is discursively managed by the interplay of cultural resources and social positionings. In particular, this suggests a hitherto unrecognised function of the objectification process: personification as position‐taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transpeople in India forge identities at the confluence of contradictory social forces. Interviews conducted in the state of Kerala suggest that the experience of transphobic stigma results in self‐employed transpeople being abjectified. Social abjectification, in turn, triggers their identity work within liminal social spaces located between the everyday lifeworld and postcolonial legal institutions. Through this work, the participants in this study navigated the contradictions between two identity‐constituting external structures: culture and law. Culture is a source of identity threat, but it also supplies a socially legitimated identity template—the hijra—used in the vital self‐formative work of mirroring and witnessing. Similarly, trans‐supportive social policies and laws provide institutional scaffolding for identities. Yet, despite the agential nature of the participants' identity work, the inherent limitations of the law and the vulnerability of embodiment render them susceptible to the ongoing threat posed by the transphobia emanating from ambient cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I put postintentionality in dialogue with de/colonizing ontoepistemologies to identify where these perspectives converge and diverge. Informed by Vagle's notion that a particular idea may have virtue in one discipline while considered a given in another, I explore the possibilities of hybridized, interdisciplinary work that crosses various borders. By placing these fluid disciplinary discourses in dialogue, I identify a shift in my thinking that situates nonsense and play as de/colonial moves by highlighting the subversive and lasting effects of a children's text written in India during British rule. Certain poststructural ideas have become so well established in my discipline (and others) that they have become a given, which has prompted me to immerse myself in exploring the role of nonsense and play in de/coloniality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark tourism, which deploys taboo subjects and commercially exploits the macabre, has always raised moral conflicts at a collective and individual level while providing new spaces in which morality is communicated, reconfigured and revitalized. Although earlier studies in dark tourism have focused upon the collective notions of morality with a considerable amount of discussion on the comprehension and the manner in which the history and information of dark tourist attractions are presented for tourist consumption, the individual differences of tourist morality and how tourists morally engage with death and its various forms of representation, has been neglected. In order to understand morally transgressive behavior displayed by tourists at emotionally sensitive or controversial sites and the various ways they justify their actions, the narratives of international tourists who are interested in death-related rituals at a cremation ground in India were collected and analyzed. Drawing upon a socio-cognitive theory, the moral mechanisms involved in tourist judgment towards photography of death-related rituals are discussed. It was observed that the cremation ground offers a liminal space for tourists to exercise their moral agency in an inhibitive form, as well as proactive form and that transgressive behavior among tourists is likely if they disengage from processes related to moral conduct using various moral disengagement mechanisms. This behavior arises due to an obscuring and fragmentation of human agency during moral disengagement thereby making it possible for tourists to not take ownership of the consequences of their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marathi cinema is a prominent regional film industry located in Mumbai, Pune and Kolhapur in western India. Since its early history, this film industry has evolved within a network of performance forms like the Marathi theatre, folk music and dance, and devotional singing (abhanga and kirtan), and the inter-exchange of personnel between these cultural formations. When the state of Maharashtra was constituted in 1960, this networked formation became even more prominent, and had to negotiate the rising competition from the more dominant Hindi cinema. Marathi cinema also had to contend with the patronage of Marathi audiences for other artistic forms like the theatre and folk performances. The attempt here is to theorize this state of in-betweenness through a spatial detailing and critical mapping of industrial tendencies, textual practices and regional entrenchment. The questions that informs this study are directed to understand regional cinema in India, and its manifestations over the decades of 1960 to 1980. Specifically, the article forwards some propositions to the ideas of: how can the history of Marathi cinema be situated against the dominant and collocative national Hindi cinema industry, with which it shares a common geography of filmmaking, exhibition and audiences? And how the concepts of social and cultural space can be extended to analyse some distinctive historical tendencies of the Marathi cinema? This analysis proposes a dialectics of space for a regional Marathi film practice, which is confirmed by a reading of films, anecdotal biographies, archival materials and trade journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An anecdotal account of a ritual from the south of India by a Portuguese adventurer from the early sixteenth century serves as pretext for a brief description of the cult of the theyyams from north Kerala in southwest India and raises questions on how we look at ritual performances. Liminality and frame, and associated notions, including flow and experience, as used by Victor Turner, provide clues for understanding an "anthropology of performance," but Turner did not give operative tools for implementation of his manifesto. Could some practical notions proposed by Grotowski be useful to the ethnography of the performance? Growtowski's concepts are applied to observations made during field research on theyyam. Findings are more outlined than concluded, but point toward some outcomes. Filipe Pereira is a performer and director who studied with Jerzy Grotowski at his Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, from 1990 to 1992. He graduated with an MA in artistic studies from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, with a dissertation on performance as ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations are formations,or as Roland Barthes has said of all operations of language,"they are deformations". Similarly,back from the days of media reports on Oriental women being despotic and sensuous, media has succesfully presented and caricatured woman-ness. In this paper of mine I will primarily focus on the television soaps and serials of India and attempt to analyse how exactly do they present women and how successful are they in their presentation of "reality'? Or is this reality a hackneyed one? There in begins my analysis. The nation which claims to be in the process of "globalisation"or "modernisaion" still portrays its women in meaningless piles of costume jewellery and jardousi sarees. When women of India are progressing to be IPS and IAS Officers, all these contemporary "slice-of-life" soaps are still entangled in familial plots and schemes. Even with some attempts to actually portray reality, Indian serials have not evolved beyond the monochromatic dimensions of a faithful wife and a scheming vamp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of history, language and power have had an inextricable relationship that has enabled the ideological domination of some people/s over others. In fact, the main problem for the citizens is to understand the origins and reasons of a conflict and to discriminate between factual information and their beliefs. The present article will look at liminality and conflict from a linguistic perspective by analyzing the function of language and power in the escalation of the conflict between India and Pakistan in December 2008. The study will carry out an analysis of the language of newspapers during the days of the pre-conflict stage (27-31 December) between these countries. The article will analyze the information that appeared on the front pages of four of the most popular English newspapers in India and Pakistan (on-line edition). The aim of this analysis is to assess the role of the written media in the construction of the cognitive scenario of the conflict, and its function in the creation of an ideological basis to justify the ignition of a conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropologica is the property of CASCA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Korwa, an indigenous community of Central India, were displaced from their forest abode four decades ago because of the state's forest policy. The resettled Korwa do not consider the new space their home and summarize their journey of displacement from hill forest to lowland villages in terms of deprivation of healthy life. The Korwa complain of fever, diffuse aches, fatigue, and frail bodies forming a part of their everyday lives thereby signaling the loss of experiential health attributed to alienation from the forest. During an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Chhatisgarh, the Korwa informants were found to be drawing a sharp contrast between the 'health-generating' attributes of forest life and the 'health-threatening' miseries of current wage labor economy. Using liminality framework, this article attempts to understand health experiences of the displaced Korwa as embodiment of their social and material conditions of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Same-sex sexualities in India have been portrayed in research and activism as socially marginal and minoritarian. Whilst proceeding from a commitment to the political utility of such a view, this paper questions such a standpoint. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in different sites, the paper considers male-to-male sexualities as enacted and implicated in the production of ostensibly heteronormative spaces. This, in turn, raises questions about the representation of the queer or same-sex sexual subject in law and HIV prevention, especially in the context of post-colonial perspectives on sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the construction of colonial identities in the British colonies of South Asia. Rather than a simple process of "othering" imposed by the colonizing power, the colonized peoples are seen as having participated in the process, as rival South Asian groups competed for various forms of social and legal recognition from Great Britain. A specific example discussed from the 19th century is that of the Khoja people, who straddled Hindu and Muslim regions and followed varying versions of Islam, thus exhibiting a liminal group identity that was played out before the colonial court in Bombay (Mumbai), India.

This article is an attempt to understand 'locality', where the issues of subversion, subordination and marginalization as well as the problematic notions of liminality and empowerment are more vibrant and real. We shall demonstrate that while the low castes and untouchables were engaged in economic conflict, at various levels, with the high-caste landowners, which resulted in occasional uprisings too, the popular belief system was used by the marginalized as an instrument of assertion of their power against social coercion. It is argued that the social and ritual protest aimed at diluting or subverting the local caste hierarchy in a stratified society is an efficacious threat to the power of the high castes; that the hope of social revision becomes an alternative to economic subordination. More important, the symbols of empowerment are not the ones controlled by the high castes, but those which are located in the specialized rituals of the marginalized dalits. This article is about these symbols, which are liminal in nature, and how they empower, if only for a brief while, the economically exploited and socially marginalized dalit practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay is about the lives of immigrant women from India and Sri Lanka and how they traverse the boundaries between their culture and white Australian culture. By using theories of diaspora, hybridity, and Australian multicultural methodology melded with empirical data through interviews with immigrant women, I provide a thought provoking glimpse into the ideas of border crossing within differing cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]