This edited volume moves the study of South Asia to the center of sociological analysis, bringing together recent scholarship across sites in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as in Ethiopia and the USA. This book situates the project of decolonizing the discipline within a rich transnational intellectual legacy and reveals how South Asia offers a uniquely generative site from which to rethink sociological practice. Recognizing local and global influences at their specific sites, the contributing authors highlight the historical ravages of colonialism and imperialism, modernization projects of the postcolonial era, and the kaleidoscopic ways in which gender, caste, class, and sexuality structure everyday life under neoliberalism today. The sociology of South Asia centers the voices and experiences of those marginalized by local and global systems of power in order to produce knowledge that advances interconnected projects of liberation.
Chapter
1. Introduction.- PART I: THE STATE FROM CENTER TO
MARGINS.- Chapter
2. Beyond State Control: How law enforcement disempowerment
shapes crime and punishment in India.- Chapter
3. We Care for You: Traffic
rules, police authority, and technological reform in Hyderabad,
India.- Chapter
4. Multiple Modernities and Multiple Traditions: Gender,
Sexuality, and Citizenship Debates in Postcolonial India.- Chapter
5. Veiled
Sociology: The Epistemologies of Purdah in Gender Segregated
Ethnography.- PART II: DISPOSSESSION, LABOR, AND RESISTANCE.- Chapter
6.
Dalits and Dispossession: A Comparison.- Chapter
7. Market Reforms and
Popular Mobilizations: The Politics of Resource Extraction in
Bangladesh.- Chapter
8. (Hindu) Workers of India, Unite!: How Class
Politics Shape Hindutvas Ascent in India.- Transparent Intrusions: Ethiopian
Labor, Indian Textiles, and Global Markets.- PART III: CULTURE, EMBODIMENT,
AND EVERYDAY LIFE.- Chapter
9. "Bodybuilding does not need American
certifications": Global Fitness Culture in Contemporary Bengal.- Chapter
10.
Of Tigers and Temples: The Jaffna Caste System in Transition During the Sri
Lankan Civil War.- Chapter
11. Living on the Fault Lines: Womens Sexuality
and Reproductive Health in Post-Disaster Nepal.- Chapter
12. Give in, cut
your hairor it makes you a very strong person: Sikh Americans and
Performing Embodied Identity as Belonging and Resistance.- Chapter
13.
Afterword.
Smitha Radhakrishnan is LuElla LaMer Professor of Womens Studies and Sociology at Wellesley College, USA. She is the author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (2011) and Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (2022), both from Duke University Press.
Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, USA. She is author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021) and has published in World Development, Qualitative Sociology, Social Problems, and Gender & Society, among other journals.
