Alterations – serie

Orphans of Islam portrays the abject lives and "excluded body" of abandoned and bastard children in contemporary Morocco, while critiquing the concept and practice of "adoption," which too often is considered a panacea. Through a close and historically grounded reading of legal, social, and cultural mechanisms of one predominantly Islamic country, Jamila Bargach shows how "the surplus bastard body" is created by mainstream society. Written in part from the perspectives of the children and single mothers, intermittently from the view of "adopting" families, and employing bastardy as a haunting and empowering motif with a potentially subversive edge, this ethnography is composed as an intricate, open-ended, and arabesque-like evocation of Moroccan society and its state institutions. It equally challenges received sociological and anthropological tropes and understandings of the Arab world.

What need is there for kinship? What good is it anyway? The questions are as old as anthropology itself, but few answers have been enduringly persuasive. Kinship systems can contribute to our enslavement, but more often they permit, channel, and facilitate our relations with others and our further fashioning of ourselves—as kin but also as subjects of other kinds. When they do, they are among the matrices of our lives as ethical beings. Each contributor to this innovative book treats his or her own alterity as the touchstone of the exploration of an ethnographically and historically specific ethics of kinship. Together, the chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of the entanglement of the subject of kinship with the subject of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, desire. The chapters speak eloquently to the sometimes liberating stories that we cannot help but keep telling about our kin and ourselves.

Religious Identity and Political Destiny: 'Hindutva' in the Culture of Ethnicism is an ethnography of a contentious, ongoing debate about the place of religion in Indian civic life. Exploring Hindu nationalism from the varied perspectives of its critics in women's activist and Left intellectual circles, as well as its ideologues, supporters, and sympathizers, Deepa Reddy locates 'Hindutva' in a broader culture of critique where identity movements of all kinds compete for recognition, representation, and rights. Her narrative poses two central questions: 'How does religion order the modern social world?' and 'How does secular practice order the modern religious world?' Both are directed at reading Hindu ethnicism not as a pathology of modernity or a form of extremism itself, but as a part-religious, part-secular rationality that challenges the exclusion of religion from public life and secular politics in India. Reddy combines theoretical analysis, autobiographical narrative and ethnographic reportage to reveal 'Hindutva' as a multifaceted phenomenon that is interpreted and employed, opposed and supported, in as many ways as it is ideologically produced. Hindu ethnicism, she argues, is best read as a critique illuminating the contradictions of a decaying politics and the struggle to move beyond it; and as a rationality for modernity that we can ignore only at our own peril. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, as well as readers of ethno-nationalist movements, religion, activism, global feminisms, and all matters Indian/South Asian.

Religious Identity and Political Destiny: 'Hindutva' in the Culture of Ethnicism is an ethnography of a contentious, ongoing debate about the place of religion in Indian civic life. Exploring Hindu nationalism from the varied perspectives of its critics in women's activist and Left intellectual circles, as well as its ideologues, supporters, and sympathizers, Deepa Reddy locates 'Hindutva' in a broader culture of critique where identity movements of all kinds compete for recognition, representation, and rights. Her narrative poses two central questions: 'How does religion order the modern social world?' and 'How does secular practice order the modern religious world?' Both are directed at reading Hindu ethnicism not as a pathology of modernity or a form of extremism itself, but as a part-religious, part-secular rationality that challenges the exclusion of religion from public life and secular politics in India. Reddy combines theoretical analysis, autobiographical narrative and ethnographic reportage to reveal 'Hindutva' as a multifaceted phenomenon that is interpreted and employed, opposed and supported, in as many ways as it is ideologically produced. Hindu ethnicism, she argues, is best read as a critique illuminating the contradictions of a decaying politics and the struggle to move beyond it; and as a rationality for modernity that we can ignore only at our own peril. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, as well as readers of ethno-nationalist movements, religion, activism, global feminisms, and all matters Indian/South Asian.

Distinguished anthropologist George Marcus and his co-author Fernando Mascarenhas engage in a new experiment in anthropological writing. Ocasi

Distinguished anthropologist George Marcus and his co-author Fernando Mascarenhas engage in a new experiment in anthropological writing. Ocasião reveals the key relationship between anthropologist and subject through the letters and commentaries exchanged between Marcus and Mascarenhas, Marques of Fronteira and Alorna in Portugal. The authors discuss the persistence and survival of the contemporary Portuguese nobility, who serve as witnesses to important transitions in modern Portuguese history. The epistolary form is the medium of this innovative ethnography, and will stimulate a new critique of ethnographic genres, originating in the work of James Clifford and Marcus in Writing Culture. This new book will appeal to readers concerned with anthropological methods and fieldwork; the anthropology of elites, and a diverse European and American community of scholars interested in Portuguese culture.