This book brings together James C. Scott's most important work on peasant religion and ideology; everyday forms of peasant resistance; and state technologies of personal identification. In a collection of interrelated essays Scott introduces the major concepts that lie at the core of his work and illustrates, through ethnographic and historical work how they can be understood through practical examples.

The advent of information technology ushered in new forms of political power. Machines play crucial roles in how states see, understand, and act, and scrutiny of these processes lies at the heart of Identify and Sort. It frames debates about IT in world politics, explaining how industrial sorting systems employed by political actors are renegotiating the social contract between individuals and the state. Ansorge takes the reader on a global expedition that tracks the historical antecedents of digital power, from Aztec and Inca rituals, to medieval filing systems, to a grandiose 1930s design for a German registry, to the databases used in US presidential campaigns and how IT is deployed in war and post-conflict reconstruction. Databases are also deployed virtually to record and act upon people who have no publicly visible identification or group consciousness; modern wars and election campaigns are fought on this individualised terrain. The uneven distribution of these technical capacities engenders inequality of access, while rights discourses and legal frameworks forged in an era of mass group discrimination, subjugation, and public resistance lag behind these micro-targeting practices. Rich in examples and ideas, Identify and Sort develops an analytical model and vocabulary to explain the functions and limits of digital power in world politics.

Contested Histories and Politics of People is an analytical interface to the plurivocal trajectories and influential approaches fashioned by Subaltern Studies. It highlights the diverse methods and the dynamics of resistance that augmented specific ways of countering hegemonic domination. Power manipulated and subjugated subaltern classes both from within (through elite nationalists) and outside (through colonialism). Bringing together the splintered movements that revolutionarily resist hegemonic state power, Subaltern Studies unearths subsumed narratives and subjugated knowledges. Accordingly, it contributes towards a critique of neo-colonial politics and powers that influence and alter history. This book suggests that what emerged as a historical-critical method to challenge dominant historiography, hegemony and power has contributed towards the formation of a cultural history.

This book explains farmer suicides in India in the backdrop of rural politics as a determining factor. By bringing in politics as a variable the research presented in the book reveals that there are non-farm factors playing critical role in prompting behavioral change amongst the peasantry but haven’t received much academic attention. The book argues that the changing nature of public spaces has significantly altered the perception of self in the rural society of India. It presents indicators of this rural change and how the state policy and political parties led political mobilization that changed the character of community relations in the rural areas. The book shows that other possible manifestations of the large-scale behavioral change in the rural areas and increasing rural distress, those are equally serious but haven’t received much attention, are rising cases of drug-addiction, agrarian riots, or other forms of collective violence. The increasing number of farmers protests also need to be understood in this context.

If ancient history is particularly susceptible to a top-down approach, due to the nature of our evidence and its traditional exploitation by modern scholars, another ancient history—‘from below’—is actually possible. This volume examines the possibilities and challenges involved in writing it. Despite undeniable advances in recent decades, ‘our slowness to reconstruct plausible visions of almost any aspect of society beyond the top-most strata of wealth, power or status’ (as Nicholas Purcell has put it) remains a persistent feature of the field. Therefore, this book concerns a historical field and social groups that are still today neglected by modern scholarship. However, writing ancient history ‘from below’ means much more than taking into account the anonymous masses, the subaltern classes and the non-elites. Our task is also, in the felicitous expression coined by Walter Benjamin, ‘to brush history against the grain,’ to rescue the viewpoint of the subordinated, the traditions of the oppressed. In other words, we should understand the bulk of ancient populations in light of their own experience and their own reactions to that experience. But, how do we do such a history? What sources can we use? What methods and approaches can we employ? What concepts are required to this endeavour? The contributions mainly engage with questions of theory and methodology, but they also constitute inspiring case studies in their own right, ranging from classical Greece to the late antique world. This book is aimed not only at readers working on classical Greece, republican and imperial Rome and late antiquity but at anyone interested in ‘bottom-up’ history and social and population history in general. Although the book is primarily intended for scholars, it will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students of history, archaeology and classical studies.

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary – ‘us’ and ‘them’ – terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy. This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century’s foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aimé Césaire dubbed tropicalité. It explores how Gourou’s interpretations of ‘the nature’ of the tropical world, and its innate difference from the temperate world, were built on the shifting sands of twentieth-century history – empire and freedom, modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, and race and development. The book addresses key questions about the location and power of knowledge by focusing on Gourou’s cultivation of the tropics as a romanticised, networked and affective domain. The book probes what Césaire described as Gourou’s ‘impure and worldly geography’ as a way of opening up interdisciplinary questions of geography, ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students within historical geography, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and international relations.

The idea of citizenship is formed through a dynamic and flexible set of relationships that go beyond a sequence of formal rights and duties. It is recurring in everyday social contexts—in practices that play out in the real world, in the everyday exercises or refusals of citizenship rights, in the purposeful defiance of norms, and in the tactical evasions of duties. This book explores the troubled relationship between a state and its citizens across four different kinds of social spaces in Limassol, Cyprus. Tactical Citizenships is a testament to the tenacity and resourcefulness of marginalized individuals in directing their relations with the state.

'...a brilliant exploration of urbanism between the concept city and the lived city.... The volume focuses on urban life lived between home and the world, institutions and experiences, representations and affects.... Its fascinating range of empirically rich and analytically sophisticated excavations of neighbourhoods make the volume a must-have in the bookshelf on South Asian urban studies.' -Gyan Prakash, Princeton University 'A must-read for those who wish to study the micro aspects of contemporary urbanity.' -Sujata Patel, Savitribai Phule Pune University 'This book is a powerful addition to the study of Indian urbanism.' -Ravi Sundaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) In the last couple of decades, the global South, in general, and India, in particular, have witnessed a massive growth of cities. In India, more than one-third of its population lives in cities. However, urban development, growth and expansion are not merely about infrastructures and enlargement of cityscapes. This edited volume focuses on neighbourhoods, their particularities and their role in shaping our understanding of the urban in India. It locates Indian experiences in the larger context of the global South and seeks to decentre the dominant Euro-American discourse of urban social life. Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and the City offers an understanding of neighbourhoods as changing socio-spatial units in their specific regional settings by underlining the way value regimes (religiosity and subjectivities) give neighbourhoods their social meanings and stereotypes. It unpacks discourses and knowledge practices, such as planning, architecture and urban discourses of governance. It further discloses the linkages and disjunctures between the social practices of neighbourhoods and the language, logic and experiences of dwelling, housing, urban planning and governance, and focuses on the particularities and heterogeneities of neighbourhoods and neighbourliness.

This book explores creative interdisciplinary and potentially transformative solutions to the current stalemate in contemporary water policy design. A more open policy conversation about water than exists at present is proposed – one that provides a space for the role of the imagination and is inclusive – of the arts and humanities, relevant stakeholders, including landholders and Indigenous peoples, as well as science, law and economics. Written for a wide audience, including practitioners and professional readers, as well as scholars and students, the book demonstrates the value of multiple disciplines, voices, perspectives, knowledges and different ways of relating to water. It provides a fresh and timely response to the urgent need for water policy that works to achieve sustainability, and may be better able to resolve complex environmental, social and cultural water issues. Utilising a broad range of evidentiary sources and case studies from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere, the authors of this edited collection demonstrate how new ways of thinking and imagining water are not only possible but already practised, and growing in saliency and impact. The current dominance of narrower ways of conceptualising our relationship with water is critiqued, including market valuation and water privatisation, and more innovative alternatives are described, including those that recognise the importance of place-based stories and narratives, adopt traditional ecological knowledge and relational water appreciations, and apply cutting-edge behavioural and ecological systems science. The book highlights how innovative approaches drawing on a wide range of views may counter prevailing policy myopia, enable reflexive governance and transform water policy towards addressing water security questions and the broader challenges posed by the Anthropocene and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Research on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer has often neglected the agency of the governed. This collection argues that limited statehood – the lack of state capacities in most parts of the global South – provides opportunities for the governed to raise their voices and be listened to. Thus, people on the receiving end of development cooperation, state building, or security interventions can significantly shape global dynamics of normative and institutional change. Drawing on the emerging body of literature on the agency of the governed, this book assesses the current dynamics of transfer and diffusion studies at the interstice of political science and social anthropology. By focusing on the agency of the governed, the authors integrate a broad spectrum of issues and debates, from the proliferation of global norms to state and security building to international policy cooperation. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of global politics and international relations, particularly those focusing on the global South. It was originally published as a special issue of the online journal Third World Thematics.