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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Moral Economy And The Upper Peasant: The Dynamics Of Land Privatization In The Mekong Delta, Timothy Gorman
Moral Economy And The Upper Peasant: The Dynamics Of Land Privatization In The Mekong Delta, Timothy Gorman
Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production, and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants. I then detail the ways in which these upper peasants mobilized around notions of distributive justice to successfully press demands for land restitution in the late 1980s, drawing on Vietnamese newspapers and …
Religious Practice And The Phenomenology Of Everyday Violence In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh
Religious Practice And The Phenomenology Of Everyday Violence In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh
Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
This article focuses on ‘dread’ in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and …
Work, Performance, And The Social Ethic Of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh
Work, Performance, And The Social Ethic Of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice In Contemporary India, Vikash Singh
Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the “strong discourse” of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an …