Anindita Majumdar – författare

Exploring Reproduction: Anthropological Perspectives introduces students to the dynamic field of the anthropology of reproduction, examining how human reproduction is shaped by cultural, historical, and political forces.This textbook engages with key issues such as fertility, infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, childbirth, contraception, reproductive governance, genetics, and justice. Drawing on foundational anthropological concepts—like personhood, stratified reproduction, and biopolitics—it introduces students to the various ways in which reproduction intersects with gender, sexuality, kinship, and social institutions. Through case studies and theoretical insights, the book showcases the relevance of anthropological approaches to understanding reproductive health, rights, and policy across diverse contexts.Exploring Reproduction: Anthropological Perspectives is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, public health, allied medicine, biology, and related fields exploring reproduction, identity, and power.

Exploring Reproduction: Anthropological Perspectives introduces students to the dynamic field of the anthropology of reproduction, examining how human reproduction is shaped by cultural, historical, and political forces.This textbook engages with key issues such as fertility, infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, childbirth, contraception, reproductive governance, genetics, and justice. Drawing on foundational anthropological concepts—like personhood, stratified reproduction, and biopolitics—it introduces students to the various ways in which reproduction intersects with gender, sexuality, kinship, and social institutions. Through case studies and theoretical insights, the book showcases the relevance of anthropological approaches to understanding reproductive health, rights, and policy across diverse contexts.Exploring Reproduction: Anthropological Perspectives is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, public health, allied medicine, biology, and related fields exploring reproduction, identity, and power.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been fast growing since its evolution and experiments with various new add-on features; human efficiency is one among those and the most controversial topic. This chapter focuses on its attention towards studying human consciousness and AI independently and in conjunction. It provides theories and arguments on AI being able to adapt human-like consciousness, cognitive abilities and ethics. This chapter studies responses of more than 300 candidates of the Indian population and compares it against the literature review. Furthermore, it also discusses whether AI could attain consciousness, develop its own set of cognitive abilities (cognitive AI), ethics (AI ethics) and overcome human beings’ efficiency. This chapter is a study of the Indian population’s understanding of consciousness, cognitive AI and AI ethics.

Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ in intimate relationships.Fictions and fictive kinship within anthropology are contested ideas. Increasingly, research suggests the idea of intimate relationships has to extend beyond the biological assumption of kinship relations. The idea of fiction is also not free from the biological imagination or the persistent dichotomy of nature-culture/nurture-nature. This edited volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, translate into practices, or create an experiential understanding around relationships. The chapters in this book reengage the idea of fiction by exploring the ambiguity within household relationships, the process of making and engaging with a craft and skill, and the intricacies of making children through IVF and third-party involvement. They challenge societal norms of marriage and being married by reframing shared substances and the relationality they carry and by remembering deceased ties through acts of resurrection. Through vivid illustrations of life and living in South Asia, each chapter contributes to an understanding of how fiction and reality are mutually creating each other.This book will be beneficial to students, academics and scholars of anthropology, particularly those interested in kinship and the sociology of the family. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.