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.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.