Thomas Blom Hansen – författare

When Bombay changed its name to Mumbai in 1995, it was the culmination of a long process that transformed India''s primary symbol of modernity and cultural diversity into a site of intense ethnic conflict and violent nationalism. Wages of Violence is a startling account of how the city''s atmosphere, dominant public languages, and power structures have changed since the 1960s. The book centers on how Shiv Sena, a militant Hindu movement, has advanced a new, ''''plebeian'''' political culture and has undermined democratic rule in India''s premier city. Drawing on a large body of archival material and conversations with people from all walks of life, Thomas Blom Hansen paints a vivid picture of this dynamic and violent movement. Challenging conventional views of recent trends in Indian politics, Hansen shows that the xenophobic public culture of today''s Mumbai has deep roots in the region''s history and its contested identities. We are also given revealing insights into the city''s Muslim communities and the authorities'' understanding and control of the ethno-religious subcultures in the city. Hansen argues cogently that Shiv Sena''s success represents the violent possibilities of the ''''vernacularization'''' of democracy in India. Unfolding at a juncture where the globalization of India''s economy is having a deepening impact on the lives of ordinary people, this is a story that resonates with the directions urban growth is taking both elsewhere in India and beyond.

Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

The rise of strong nationalist and religious movements in postcolonial and newly democratic countries alarms many Western observers. In The Saffron Wave, Thomas Hansen turns our attention to recent events in the world''s largest democracy, India. Here he analyzes Indian receptivity to the right-wing Hindu nationalist party and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which claims to create a polity based on "ancient" Hindu culture. Rather than interpreting Hindu nationalism as a mainly religious phenomenon, or a strictly political movement, Hansen places the BJP within the context of the larger transformations of democratic governance in India. Hansen demonstrates that democratic transformation has enabled such developments as political mobilization among the lower castes and civil protections for religious minorities. Against this backdrop, the Hindu nationalist movement has successfully articulated the anxieties and desires of the large and amorphous Indian middle class. A form of conservative populism, the movement has attracted not only privileged groups fearing encroachment on their dominant positions but also "plebeian" and impoverished groups seeking recognition around a majoritarian rhetoric of cultural pride, order, and national strength. Combining political theory, ethnographic material, and sensitivity to colonial and postcolonial history, The Saffron Wave offers fresh insights into Indian politics and, by focusing on the links between democracy and ethnic majoritarianism, advances our understanding of democracy in the postcolonial world.

9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. Sovereign Bodies shifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unstable whose efficacy depends less on formal rules than on repeated acts of violence. Following the editors'' introduction are fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the globe that analyze cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, as well as practices of citizenship and belonging--in South Africa, Peru, India, Mexico, Cyprus, Norway, and also among transnational Chinese and Indian populations. Sovereign Bodies enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana María Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.

PHP is a server-side scripting language that enables you to develop dynamic sites that engage users in ways that are simply not possible using only HTML and CSS. PHP for Absolute Beginners takes a practical approach to teaching you how to build dynamic content for your website using PHP. You’ll quickly get started with practical PHP projects, learning how to build a dynamic image gallery. By the end of the book you’ll will have developed a personal blog complete with a password protected admin module.

PHP for Absolute Beginners won''t swamp you with every detail of the full PHP language up front – instead, you’ll be introduced to a small, versatile subset of PHP and learn to use it creatively to develop dynamic web sites. In the process you will learn to use variables, control structures, functions, and objects to your advantage. You will learn how to plan and create databases and how to organize your PHP scripts beautifully. At the end of the book, you will be a confident PHP user, ready to take the next steps in creating great websites.

Embark on a practical journey of building dynamic sites aided by multiple projects that can be easily adapted to real-world scenarios. This third edition will show you how to become a confident PHP developer, ready to take the next steps to being a Full Stack Developer and/or successful website or web application programmer.  

You won''t be swamped with every detail of the full PHP language up front – instead, you’ll be introduced to a small, versatile subset of PHP by learning to use it creatively to develop dynamic projects. You will see how to use variables, control structures, functions, and object-oriented programming. Secure programming techniques are used throughout the book to demonstrate the proper way to defend against hackers. You will learn how to plan and create MySQL/MariaDB databases and access them using PHP.  During this process, you will be introduced to data objects, UI design concepts, and design patterns. Model-View-Controller (MVC) methodology will be used to keep a consistent logical design for each project. 

Four main projects will be introduced: an image gallery, a blogging system, a data management dashboard, and an interactive game. Initially, a general discussion of how operating systems make programming easier, more reliable, and efficient will be provided. A brief example will follow to demonstrate installation of the latest versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL/MariaDB. Basic PHP logic will be used during the development of the first project, an image gallery. Once these concepts have been absorbed, a further review of additional concepts of PHP 8 will be discussed, followed by an extensive blogging system will use MVC to reinforce and introduce additional PHP techniques. You’ll also discover the use of Google Charts to create a data management dashboard. Finally, you’ll explore arrays in more depth by developing logic for a checkers game. Along the way, exercises and projects areprovided to reinforce what has been learned. 

What You''ll Learn

Who This Book Is For 

Aspiring web developers and designers who are new to web development and/or PHP; programmers who are new to PHP and even programming itself.