An AltaMira Press Book A critical anthropological study of contemporary India, this book explicates the cultural roles, presence and limitations of the ordinary, quotidian Indian. It also comments on the distinct challenges that tumultuous India poses to modern anthropology. In the first part, the author evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of recent anthropological approaches and concepts employed to study contemporary India. In the second part, he discusses major cultural, religious, and political conflicts by ...
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An AltaMira Press Book A critical anthropological study of contemporary India, this book explicates the cultural roles, presence and limitations of the ordinary, quotidian Indian. It also comments on the distinct challenges that tumultuous India poses to modern anthropology. In the first part, the author evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of recent anthropological approaches and concepts employed to study contemporary India. In the second part, he discusses major cultural, religious, and political conflicts by employing ethnographic field research help to elaborate the discourse. Firmly grounded in current social reality, this book does not treat the conceptual speculation as theory nor accord priority to any particular Indian or Western conceptual schemes. Rather, the author conceptualizes the issues by being in dialogue with living groups and communities, examining each in its contact and evaluating their import according to the issue at hand. Khare thus provides an eloquent portrait of contemporary India with its bright and dark spotsCdifferent in so many ways from 1947, and yet not quite so.
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