Veronique Benei, 2008: Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 346 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5906-9 (paperback) $24.95.
Progress in Development Studies 10, 3 (2010) pp. 267–77 known areas which are excellent examples of the ongoing struggle in the global south against what has (at least until the recent economic collapse) been an overwhelmingly neo-liberal development ideology. But at the same time, the book does not give enough space to each chapter to allow the countries and issues to be represented in enough depth. The brevity of some chapters and the assumptions that have to be made about the readers prior knowledge of a given country’s situation mean that the book can, at times, be a little inaccessible for a non-expert audience, and is too brief for more than use as an occasional reference tool for the more specialist reader. While I found the various chapters to be interesting and relevant pieces that helped to understand the nature of contemporary political struggle, with every chapter there was more that could be said, and despite the stated aim on the cover of each chapter being a ‘snapshot’, I was still left feeling that by adding a few more pages to each chapter, then the overall picture of popular struggle and its role in democratization and development would have benefi tted greatly.
Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform—Stories from the Muslim ‘Ghetto’1
Abstract This paper is a critique of popular and academic assumptions about the Muslim ‘community’ and Islamist organizations, especially in the context of displacement and reconstruction after the 2002 riots in Ahmedabad, western India. It explores the internal politics of Jamaat-led organizations and the engagement of survivors with ideas of reform and piety. Contesting contemporary understandings of reformist Jamaats, I argue that the growing influence of the latter organizations had little co-relation with their resettlement plans and policies. The reconstruction patterns were more closely linked to the history of labour migration to the city, and the subsequent movement of violence-affected people from the mill areas to larger Muslim ghettoes. My ethnography shows how the survivors strategically engaged with reform initiatives and negotiated with local Islamist organizations for ‘safe housing’. By illustrating certain ambiguities within the everyday practices of Islam, my paper also problematizes notions of ‘piety’ and ‘agency’, primarily after people's experiences of communal violence.
Remaking a World - Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery
Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.Reviewer: Sima AprahamianConcordia UniversityRemaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery edited by Veena Das et al. is the third (and last) volume on social suffering, violence and recovery compiled by the members of the Committee on Culture, Health, and Human Development of the Social Science Research Council (New York). Whereas the first two volumes Social Suffering and Violence and Subjectivity examined the effects of problems related to force, political, economic, institutional power on individuals and communities, this last volume explores how people build their lives after collective trauma or after being marginalized through structured violence.As described in the insightful introduction by Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Remaking a World brings together six ethnographic papers interwoven through "the thread of narration." The six essays in Remaking a World focus on the remaking of everday life after social trauma. The overlapping fibers of the ethnographic cases as Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman point out, deal with the following: "(a) relation between collective and individual memory; (b) creation of alternative public spheres for articulating and recounting experience silenced by officially sanctioned narratives; (c) retrieval of voice in the face of recalcitrance of tragedy; and (d) meaning of healing and the return to everyday" (p. 3).The ethnographic essays in Remaking a World often poetically address the issues of social trauma and the remaking of everyday life through a uniquely anthropological perspective that explores how violence "works on lives and interconnections to break communities" (p. 1). This is a welcome contribution in a field dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists whose focus is on documenting, diagnosing posttraumatic stress disorder. The anthropological approach brings into attention issues of cultural representations, collective experience, critiques of the construction of knowledge based on the appropriation of social suffering. It also highlights the consequences of social suffering on everyday life; the effects of collective violence and social trauma on the individual, and "coping" with social suffering.After exploring everyday life in the context of violence, the focus in Remaking a World is thus on mappings of healing and re-starting anew a life disrupted and affected by violence through detailed ethnographic case studies. The case studies compiled in this volume are marked with great diversity. …