川东北非物质文化遗产保护与开发研究

近十余年来,人们对物质文化遗产的研究比较重视,对非物质文化遗产的保护和开发研究却相对滞后。尤其是川东北地区的非物质文化遗产正遭到不同程度的破坏,甚至濒临灭绝。文章分析了川东北非物质文化遗产的主要类型,并针对这一现象提出了实现其可持续发展的开发方案和保护对策。     

Internal migration and citizenship in India

Immigrants and the process of incorporation can elucidate what it means to be a member of a national citizenry and sociopolitical community. However, relatively little scholarship has focused on the potential of internal migration to highlight citizenship outcomes. This article presents fieldwork from Mumbai and Kolkata to show that citizenship status, rights, and belonging are more restrictive for Indian citizens who are internal migrants than for those who are not. It argues that development factors alone are insufficient explanations for citizenship outcomes in India, and shows that internal migrants experience a lesser citizenship status and curtailed citizenship rights because they are migrants rather than because of their impoverishment or because of the limited capacity of the state.     

Negotiated identities: Male migration and left-behind wives in India

This paper examines the impact of husbands’ migration on the lives of women left behind. Using data from the India Human Development Survey 2005, we focus on two dimensions of women’s lives: women’s autonomy and control over their lives; and women’s labour force participation. Results suggest that household structure forms the key mediating factor through which husbands’ absence affects women. Women not residing in extended families are faced with both higher levels of responsibilities and greater autonomy, while women who live in extended households do not experience these demands or benefits.     

Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a “New” India

This study of professional software women in urban India examines practices of respectable femininity and discourses of the Indian family to understand the changing and abiding aspects of a seemingly new national culture. Colonial and nationalist constructs of the Indian home, and the middle-class women who protected that home, continue to powerfully shape everyday articulations of national belonging, even as they are transformed through individual negotiations and a global economy. Drawing from extensive interviews and ethnographic work, this paper analyzes the interplay of gender, class, and nation in contemporary urban India as individualized, gendered efforts to accumulate symbolic capital.

An Exploratory Study of Financial Remittances Among Non-Resident Indians in the United States

Remittances by immigrants and temporary workers of Indian origin in industrialized countries are a growing part of India’s economy. In this exploratory study we examine the social and economic characteristics affecting the remittance pattern of working households (or families) of Indian origin residing in the United States. As most previous studies have been undertaken at the macroeconomic level, our main contribution lies in identifying the household level factors that may influence remittances. Using an online and a mail-in survey of 39 households we find some of the significant factors affecting remittances. We also validate some of the remittance-related policies of the Indian government.

Beyond the “digital divide”: the “computer girls” of Seelampur

In the last decade, India’s position as a global information economy has aided its status as the poster child for Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) initiatives in the global South. Policy discourse emphasizes that crossing of the “digital divide” through access to technology will bring a leveling of economic and social hierarchies. Based on sustained ethnographic observations and interviews in Seelampur in New Delhi, my paper critically examines the promise of inclusion in the information society for low income “Muslim women.” In following the lives of the “computer girls” of Seelampur, I argue that access to computer training contradictorily reproduced and reified interconnected divisions of gender, class, caste, and religion. Ethnographic research reveals the complexities of everyday lived experiences among Seelampur women. The space of the ICT center was rigidly stratified and the center primarily attracted women from relatively higher class and caste positions within Seelampur. However, I argue that the women had contradictory experiences related to their status as India’s “middle-class” that restricted their economic and social mobility outside the ICT center. Their experiences testified to structural disempowerment that disrupted deterministic assumptions about ICT and mobility.     

Seclusion,decision-making power,and gender disparities in adult health: Examining hypertension in India

Research on the social determinants of health in developing countries is increasingly focusing on the importance of gender. Cardiovascular conditions such as hypertension are a growing concern in developing countries, where they are now the leading cause of death. Researchers have documented differences in hypertension between men and women, but the importance of gendered practices in shaping these differences has been left unexamined. Using national data from the India Human Development Survey 2005 (N = 101,593), this study assesses the moderating role of two salient and widespread gendered practices—women’s seclusion and decision-making power—on hypertension disparities between women and men. Both seclusion and low decision-making power are associated with increased odds of hypertension for women, but in the case of seclusion reduced hypertension for men. Results also show the gender gap in hypertension is exacerbated with women’s seclusion and low decision-making power.     

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme: A Policy Solution to Rural Poverty in India?

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was developed by the Indian government to reduce rural poverty through 100 days of guaranteed employment per year. Using focus group methods, we explore whether this scheme has provided rights' based social protection through guaranteed employment for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Odisha. We found that the experiences of participating in MGNREGA varied depending on how MGNREGA wages compared to market wages in the region, as well as local implementation of the program. Although MGNREGA offered some basic employment for marginalized groups, it did not provide substantial help to the most vulnerable. However, there was some evidence of small but significant shifts in labour relations. Higher wages, more opportunities for work, better implementation and a greater recognition of the caregiving responsibilities of women will be required for this policy to fully meet its goals.     

At the frontier of imperial history: revisiting Edward Gait’s A History of Assam

Edward Gait’s A History of Assam was first published in 1906, later revised in 1926. The book has remained one of the most popular ‘textbooks’ in Assam, especially as the first modern historiography on the subject. This article looks at two broad issues in this regard. First, it looks at the contradictions that Gait was faced with in terms of his imperial ideology and interpreting the historical sources of an imperial frontier. Second, it tries to situate the relevance of the above point vis-à-vis some of the contemporary attempts at re-framing the region as an international borderland. In conclusion, the article looks at the reception of Gait and his appropriation into different discourses within Assam. A point explored is whether despite its contradictions, was Gait’s A History of Assam part of a wider, dynamic context of early twentieth century Assam, which made the book an important academic and political intervention of its times.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.