Retro-modern India

Manuela Ciotti is a social anthropologist with a PhD from the London School of Economics. She is currently Research Associate at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. She has published several articles in leading journals on topics ranging from education, labour ethnohistory, gender and class transformation, and women’s political activism.　 Drawing on research she carried out during the tenure of a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellowship, Ciotti is completing her second monograph entitled Political Agency and Gender in India (forthcoming). An edited volume entitled Femininities and Masculinities in Indian Politics (forthcoming) develops the different aspects of the gender and politics nexus. Ciotti’s focus on South Asian Studies is intertwined with her interests in anthropological epistemologies and the politics of location and representation; converging on these, a monograph provisionally entitled 'Producing Knowledge in Late Modernity: Lessons from India' is under preparation.

"Ciotti convincingly stakes out the theoretical underpinnings of “retro-modernity” and carefully builds her argument in each chapter. As such, Retro-modern India makes an original and important contribution to the field and will certainly provoke and stimulate anyone with an interest in post-colonial modernity from a “subaltern” point of view." - Clarinda Still, Pacific Affairs: Volume 84, No. 4 – December 2011

• Orthography and Transliteration. Glossary of Selected Terms. Foreword. Acknowledgements 1. Chamar Modernity: Progressing into the Past 2. 'Today We Cannot Touch Anything': Reflections on the Crux of Identity and Political Economy 3. Ethnohistories Behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicle of a Weaving Community and its Disappearance 4. 'We Used to Live like Animals': A Self- and Community-engineering Process 5. Irrational Modernity? Religious Agency, Science and Spirits 6. Beyond the Vote: Politics as Sociality, Imagination and Identity 7. The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-naked One: Gendering Retro-modernity 8. The Politics of Indian Modernity Bibliography. About the Author. Index