This book presents a conceptual and methodological framework to understand South Asia by engaging with the practices of sociology and social anthropology in India and Nepal. It provides a new imagination of South Asia by connecting historical, political, religious and cultural divides of the region. Drawing from the experiences of Indian and Nepali social anthropology, the book discusses the presence of Nepal studies in Indian social anthropology and vice versa. It highlights Nepal or South Asia as a subject for social anthropological research and stresses on pluriversal knowledge production through regional scholarship, dialogic social anthropology, South Asian episteme, post-Western social anthropology and the decolonisation of disciplines. In exploring the themes and problems of doing social anthropology in Nepal by Indian scholars, the book assesses the scope of developing the South Asian social anthropological worldview. It explains why social anthropological and sociological inquiry in India has failed to surpass its focus beyond the territorial limits of the nation state. The book examines the issues of methodological nationalism and social anthropological research tradition in South Asia. By using the Saidian framework of travelling theory and Bhambra’s idea of connected sociologies, it shows how social anthropology can develop disciplinary crossroads within South Asia. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers of South Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, social anthropology, South Asian sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, area studies, cultural studies, Nepal studies and Global South studies.

This book is a collection of autobiographical narratives by leading social scientists working across South Asia. It explores the linkages between their personal experiences and academic pursuits and analyzes how personal, political, and professional choices shape knowledge production and affect social transformation. The narratives revisit long-standing debates on objectivity, subjectivity, self, and other and attempt to collapse the binaries that have informed the social sciences until now. Highlighting the state of research and pedagogy in the social sciences in the region, the book questions the conventional understanding of the task of the social scientist and, in doing so, blurs the distinction between theory, research, pedagogy, and activism. A unique and compelling contribution, this volume will be indispensable to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, history, creative writing, education, politics, biography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to general readers.

Taking South Asia as its focus, this wide-ranging collection probes the general reluctance of the cultural anthropology to engage with contemporary visual art and artists, including painting, sculpture, performance art and installation. Through case studies engaged equally in anthropology and visual studies, contributors examine art and artistic production in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal to bring the social and political complexities of artistic practice to the fore. Demonstrating the potential of the visual as a means to understand a society, its values, and its politics, this volume ranges across discourses of anthropology, sociology, biography, memory, art history, and contemporary practices of visual art. Ultimately, Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia simultaneously expands and challenges the disciplinary foci of two fields: it demonstrates to art criticism and art history the necessity of anthropological and sociological methodologies and theories, while at the same time challenging the “iconophobia” of social sciences.

Most of the papers presented at a workshop held at Sussex in January 2001 and some contributed articles; previously published.

The book theorizes gender in terms of models generalizing upon historical sources and lived realities.

One of the main problems faced by teachers and students who have a scholarly interest in Southeast Asia is the lack of general, user-friendly texts in the social sciences. The absence of an introduction to the sociology of Southeast Asia is especially unfortunate. This volume attempts to meet these needs. This is, then, the first sole-authored introductory sociology text on Southeast Asia that focuses on change and development in the region, provides an overview of the important sociological and political economy writings, and considers the key concepts and themes in the field since 1945. Some multiauthored works do exist but these either are outdated or focus on specialized topics. Aimed primarily at undergraduates up to the final year, it will also be a useful reference work for post-graduates and researchers who lack such a general work.

This book familiarises readers with a new way to treat the subject of gender, foregrounding the real voices of women, their experiences doing ethnographic work, and their courage in sharing their stories publicly for the first time in the context of India. A useful companion to more theory-based anthropological studies, the book connects ethnographic data to what eventually becomes theories formed from the field. Chapters by women from a variety of disciplines – Anthropology, Literary and Translation studies, Political Sciences – transcend the academic boundaries between social sciences and humanities. The book shows how the researchers navigate in the field, write in ways that defy their academic life and work, and call into question their narrative voice. The book presents a space for women to reflect on their individual themes of research and at partially filling the vacuum mentioned above, the silences of women’s voices and expressions. The experiences described in the chapters differ, both along the divide of a "native" and a non-"native" fieldworker and along different disciplinary fields, but they share the experience of a long-term fieldwork in India and the need to self-reflect on the impact of this experience on the way the field is represented, on the people encountered in the field, on the way the field impacted on the fieldworker. The book is a useful presentation of how female researchers act in the field as women and scholars. Filling a gap in the existing literature of ethnographic research methods, the book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of Gender Studies, Social Work, Sociology, Anthropology and Asian Studies.

In a path-breaking series of essays the contributors to this collection explore the development of anthropological research in Asia. The volume includes writings on Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.