Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons^™

Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography Of An Indian Resource Frontier, Madhuri Karak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work analyzes resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in India’s bauxite-rich, densely forested Niyamgiri Hills. Nestled in the southwestern corner of Odisha state, the region is marginal to both colonial and postcolonial orders, an inaccessible resource frontier. I discuss how Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities threatened with displacement by bauxite mining – two of India’s 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups – draw on historically oppositional subjectivities to re-envision relations of power between the state, the market and the commons.

Over the past decade, new forms of sociality borne out of Niyamgiri’s anti-mining social movement …

"When We Demand Our Share Of This World”: Struggles For Space, New Possibilities Of Planning, And Municipalist Politics In Mumbai, Malav J. Kanuga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents an urban history of Bombay/Mumbai from the perspective of a politics of plurality, arguing that while the city has emerged from governmental control and planning, its development has also been shaped by myriad popular productive forces of urban society. The dissertation traces the uneven development of the city through significant planning policies, popular movements, and lived experiences of various struggles against regimes of developmentalism—the governing ideologies of development, techniques, policies, and rules of law through which the city has been planned and governed. These ideologies and practices have shifted over time, but since the earliest days of …

American Kathaks: Embodying Memory And Tradition In New Contexts, Anisha Muni

Theses and Dissertations

Kathak, a classical Indian dance, is practiced in the US by hundreds of practitioners. Through ethnographic research, this study asks how nostalgia, authenticity, tradition, and gender meet in the collective Kathak memory, examining what the study and performance of the dance symbolizes within American contexts.