James Staples | Brunel University (original) (raw)
Papers by James Staples
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2012
More than a century after Durkheim's sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a conc... more More than a century after Durkheim's sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a concern at the heart of social science, ethnographic, crosscultural analyses of what lie behind people's attempts to take their own lives remain few in number. But by highlighting how the ethnographic method privileges a certain view of suicidal behaviour, we can go beyond the limited sociological and psychological approaches that define the field of 'suicidology' in terms of social and psychological 'pathology' to engage with suicide from our informants' own points of view-and in so doing cast the problem in a new light and new terms. In particular, suicide can be understood as a kind of sociality, as a special kind of social relationship, through which people create meaning in their own lives. In this introductory essay we offer an overview of the papers that make up this special issue and map out the theoretical opportunities and challenges they present.
Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I cond... more Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I conducted research were reduced, in popular discourse about causality, to the categories of debt, unfulfilled aspiration and desires, and romantic failures. Convincing though these explanations are, they do not help to explain why young people everywhere, faced with the same kind of existential crises, do not take their lives in comparable numbers or, indeed, why they utilise particular – and very gendered – methods of harming and/or killing themselves. Ethnographic research, however, illuminates the local specificities against which such existential crises are played out in ways that might aid our search for explanations. In this article, I explore how South Indian notions of personhood – which, in turn, lead to particular understandings and experiences of agency – might impact on how and whether people kill themselves. I also attempt to situate these local explanations of personhood and agency in the wider context of a contemporary, industrialising and, increasingly, neo-liberal India, and, in some measure, to analyse the interplay between the two.
Livelihoods -what people do to get by, in terms both of fulfilling biological needs and in giving... more Livelihoods -what people do to get by, in terms both of fulfilling biological needs and in giving meaning to their existence -is an area of enquiry salient to disciplines across the social sciences. For anthropologists the activities people carry out in a bid to survive and fulfil their desires are significant in constituting people as social beings.
Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life i... more Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the pleasures to be had in Bombay’s red light district. But for all the joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das’s story unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship. Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is to be an Indian in contemporary India.
This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly comm... more This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up in the South Indian leprosy community where I conducted long-term fieldwork, despite suicide remaining relatively uncommon amongst their leprosy-affected, and often physically disabled, parents and grandparents. Alert to the pitfalls of analytical approaches that either privilege over-arching structural explanations – like those favoured by Durkheim – or, conversely, give too much credence to individual agency and psychology, my analysis here attempts to chart a course through these polarities. It does so by drawing both on Ian Hacking’s ‘ecological niche’ metaphor – to explore how particular configurations of events and circumstances, at different times, might render suicide related behaviour more or less likely among different groups; and on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’ – to consider how particular sets of bodily dispositions might generate certain styles of attempted suicide and self-harm.
Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant observa... more Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant observation during fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, identify ‘carelessness’ and ‘superstition’ as major impediments to good health among the general population, and education as the key solution. In that such findings suggest a valorisation of personal responsibility for self-care, the Foucauldian concept of biopower appeared a salient framework for analysis. While illuminating, however, biopower was ultimately inadequate for explaining what emerged, on closer analysis, as significant discrepancies between assumptions about how disabled people engaged with healthcare services and their actual beliefs and practices; and between the moral interpretations different stakeholders made of ‘carelessness’ in describing perceived causes of disability. My data also suggested that education was not in itself a key determinant in people’s healthcare decisions. This article explores these differences between official and demotic discourses concerning the causes of disability and attempts to account for them ethnographically.
Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simpli... more Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid-twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications – depending on one’s wider social positioning – of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India.
With the promotion of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues... more With the promotion of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues across the global South, leprosy colonies have long been out of vogue for NGOs and State institutions alike. Such colonies, however, have endured. As is being increasingly recognised by those working in the leprosy field, such places have played a particular role not only in the provision of leprosy-related care, but also in forging new and collective identities for people affected by leprosy that might otherwise not have been possible. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in one such colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, and explore the values invested in it as a particular kind of place; its geographical location on the peripheries; and its architecture and layout (inspired in part by colonial sanatoriums) which have particular implications for how leprosy and its ramifications are constituted and managed.
Key words: Christianity; community-based rehabilitation (CBR); India; leprosy; therapeutic landscapes
Medical Anthropology, 2004
The national and international agencies working to eliminate leprosy are also dominant in setting... more The national and international agencies working to eliminate leprosy are also dominant in setting the boundaries of official discourse on the issue. Within these boundaries, the disease is commonly represented as a medical problem with negative social consequences, both of which will be resolved if leprosy is eliminated, and its victims treated and (if necessary) reintegrated within their social groups. For those affected by leprosy the issues are frequently different, elimination in some respects representing as much of a problem as a solution. Against this background, which I describe with reference to a group of leprosy affected people in South India and their position vis-a-vis leprosy organisations, I explore some of the contexts in which leprosy patients actively manage their own situations, often in defiance of prevailing development orthodoxies. I conclude that closer observation and analysis of the strategies patients use to manage their disease status have important policy implications.
Contributions To Indian Sociology, 2005
This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy affected people in South India... more This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy affected people in South India, explores the contrasting ways in which ideas about social completeness might be invoked in different contexts. Following an overview of how notions of 'personhood' and 'adulthood' in India have thus far been theorised, I go on to examine how my informants managed to construct their identities as 'children' in relation to foreign donors, without simultaneously surrendering claims to adult status. Since relationships with various categories of outsiders were only one set of routes through which my informants constituted themselves, the second half of the article focuses on the generational demarcations between the leprosy affected people who founded the community, and their healthy sons. Ethnographic examples illustrate how there are different ways of becoming a man and an adult, but also that these different ways draw on shared Indian idioms of what it is to be a complete person. Staples, J. 2005. Becoming a man: personhood and masculinity in a South Indian leprosy colony. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2): 279-305. Staples, J. 2005. Becoming a man: personhood and masculinity in a South Indian leprosy colony. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2): 279-305.
Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute, 2003
This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India co... more This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts -at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra -I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.
Medical Anthropology, 2012
With the promotion of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues... more With the promotion of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues across the global South, leprosy colonies have long been out of vogue for nongovernmental organizations and State institutions alike. Such colonies, however, have endured. As is being increasingly recognized by those working in the leprosy field, such places have played a particular role not only in the provision of leprosy-related care but also in forging new and collective identities for people affected by leprosy that might otherwise not have been possible. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in one such colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, and explore the values invested in it as a particular kind of place; its geographical location on the peripheries; and its architecture and layout (inspired in part by colonial sanatoriums), which have particular implications for how leprosy and its ramifications are constituted and managed.
South Asia-journal of South Asian Studies, 2008
I was initially in two minds about editing a special issue on 'stigma'. The term, it seemed to me... more I was initially in two minds about editing a special issue on 'stigma'. The term, it seemed to me, was one too often applied uncritically to bodily conditions–especially in relation to leprosy–as a vague gloss for a qualitatively diverse range of negative social reactions and attitudes, as well as a description of how they might be experienced.
Summary Synoptic life history accounts and case studies of people with leprosy have tended to fol... more Summary Synoptic life history accounts and case studies of people with leprosy have tended to follow conventionalised narrative forms, with the onset of leprosy causing a violent rupture in otherwise positively construed life courses. Many of those I worked with in India, well-versed in relating their stories to donor agencies, were also aware of the power of such narratives to access funding.
ABSTRACT This paper sets out to illustrate via ethnographic example how an NGO's official intenti... more ABSTRACT This paper sets out to illustrate via ethnographic example how an NGO's official intentions are regularly subverted–wilfully or otherwise–by the competing political and personal interests of various stakeholders, often with unpredictable consequences.
Abstract: Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in India, this article... more Abstract: Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in India, this article argues that certain impairments, in certain social contexts, are simultaneously disabling and enabling. This paradox poses difficult challenges, not only for those working with individuals affected with leprosy, but for disability activists and policy-makers. Key Words: social anthropology, leprosy, South India
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2012
More than a century after Durkheim's sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a conc... more More than a century after Durkheim's sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a concern at the heart of social science, ethnographic, crosscultural analyses of what lie behind people's attempts to take their own lives remain few in number. But by highlighting how the ethnographic method privileges a certain view of suicidal behaviour, we can go beyond the limited sociological and psychological approaches that define the field of 'suicidology' in terms of social and psychological 'pathology' to engage with suicide from our informants' own points of view-and in so doing cast the problem in a new light and new terms. In particular, suicide can be understood as a kind of sociality, as a special kind of social relationship, through which people create meaning in their own lives. In this introductory essay we offer an overview of the papers that make up this special issue and map out the theoretical opportunities and challenges they present.
Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I cond... more Explanations for increased rates of youth suicide in the South Indian leprosy colony where I conducted research were reduced, in popular discourse about causality, to the categories of debt, unfulfilled aspiration and desires, and romantic failures. Convincing though these explanations are, they do not help to explain why young people everywhere, faced with the same kind of existential crises, do not take their lives in comparable numbers or, indeed, why they utilise particular – and very gendered – methods of harming and/or killing themselves. Ethnographic research, however, illuminates the local specificities against which such existential crises are played out in ways that might aid our search for explanations. In this article, I explore how South Indian notions of personhood – which, in turn, lead to particular understandings and experiences of agency – might impact on how and whether people kill themselves. I also attempt to situate these local explanations of personhood and agency in the wider context of a contemporary, industrialising and, increasingly, neo-liberal India, and, in some measure, to analyse the interplay between the two.
Livelihoods -what people do to get by, in terms both of fulfilling biological needs and in giving... more Livelihoods -what people do to get by, in terms both of fulfilling biological needs and in giving meaning to their existence -is an area of enquiry salient to disciplines across the social sciences. For anthropologists the activities people carry out in a bid to survive and fulfil their desires are significant in constituting people as social beings.
Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life i... more Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the pleasures to be had in Bombay’s red light district. But for all the joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das’s story unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship. Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is to be an Indian in contemporary India.
This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly comm... more This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up in the South Indian leprosy community where I conducted long-term fieldwork, despite suicide remaining relatively uncommon amongst their leprosy-affected, and often physically disabled, parents and grandparents. Alert to the pitfalls of analytical approaches that either privilege over-arching structural explanations – like those favoured by Durkheim – or, conversely, give too much credence to individual agency and psychology, my analysis here attempts to chart a course through these polarities. It does so by drawing both on Ian Hacking’s ‘ecological niche’ metaphor – to explore how particular configurations of events and circumstances, at different times, might render suicide related behaviour more or less likely among different groups; and on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’ – to consider how particular sets of bodily dispositions might generate certain styles of attempted suicide and self-harm.
Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant observa... more Professional and lay explanations of disability, collected via interviews and participant observation during fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, identify ‘carelessness’ and ‘superstition’ as major impediments to good health among the general population, and education as the key solution. In that such findings suggest a valorisation of personal responsibility for self-care, the Foucauldian concept of biopower appeared a salient framework for analysis. While illuminating, however, biopower was ultimately inadequate for explaining what emerged, on closer analysis, as significant discrepancies between assumptions about how disabled people engaged with healthcare services and their actual beliefs and practices; and between the moral interpretations different stakeholders made of ‘carelessness’ in describing perceived causes of disability. My data also suggested that education was not in itself a key determinant in people’s healthcare decisions. This article explores these differences between official and demotic discourses concerning the causes of disability and attempts to account for them ethnographically.
Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simpli... more Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid-twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications – depending on one’s wider social positioning – of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India.
With the promotion of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues... more With the promotion of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues across the global South, leprosy colonies have long been out of vogue for NGOs and State institutions alike. Such colonies, however, have endured. As is being increasingly recognised by those working in the leprosy field, such places have played a particular role not only in the provision of leprosy-related care, but also in forging new and collective identities for people affected by leprosy that might otherwise not have been possible. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in one such colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, and explore the values invested in it as a particular kind of place; its geographical location on the peripheries; and its architecture and layout (inspired in part by colonial sanatoriums) which have particular implications for how leprosy and its ramifications are constituted and managed.
Key words: Christianity; community-based rehabilitation (CBR); India; leprosy; therapeutic landscapes
Medical Anthropology, 2004
The national and international agencies working to eliminate leprosy are also dominant in setting... more The national and international agencies working to eliminate leprosy are also dominant in setting the boundaries of official discourse on the issue. Within these boundaries, the disease is commonly represented as a medical problem with negative social consequences, both of which will be resolved if leprosy is eliminated, and its victims treated and (if necessary) reintegrated within their social groups. For those affected by leprosy the issues are frequently different, elimination in some respects representing as much of a problem as a solution. Against this background, which I describe with reference to a group of leprosy affected people in South India and their position vis-a-vis leprosy organisations, I explore some of the contexts in which leprosy patients actively manage their own situations, often in defiance of prevailing development orthodoxies. I conclude that closer observation and analysis of the strategies patients use to manage their disease status have important policy implications.
Contributions To Indian Sociology, 2005
This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy affected people in South India... more This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy affected people in South India, explores the contrasting ways in which ideas about social completeness might be invoked in different contexts. Following an overview of how notions of 'personhood' and 'adulthood' in India have thus far been theorised, I go on to examine how my informants managed to construct their identities as 'children' in relation to foreign donors, without simultaneously surrendering claims to adult status. Since relationships with various categories of outsiders were only one set of routes through which my informants constituted themselves, the second half of the article focuses on the generational demarcations between the leprosy affected people who founded the community, and their healthy sons. Ethnographic examples illustrate how there are different ways of becoming a man and an adult, but also that these different ways draw on shared Indian idioms of what it is to be a complete person. Staples, J. 2005. Becoming a man: personhood and masculinity in a South Indian leprosy colony. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2): 279-305. Staples, J. 2005. Becoming a man: personhood and masculinity in a South Indian leprosy colony. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(2): 279-305.
Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute, 2003
This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India co... more This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts -at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra -I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.
Medical Anthropology, 2012
With the promotion of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues... more With the promotion of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues across the global South, leprosy colonies have long been out of vogue for nongovernmental organizations and State institutions alike. Such colonies, however, have endured. As is being increasingly recognized by those working in the leprosy field, such places have played a particular role not only in the provision of leprosy-related care but also in forging new and collective identities for people affected by leprosy that might otherwise not have been possible. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in one such colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, and explore the values invested in it as a particular kind of place; its geographical location on the peripheries; and its architecture and layout (inspired in part by colonial sanatoriums), which have particular implications for how leprosy and its ramifications are constituted and managed.
South Asia-journal of South Asian Studies, 2008
I was initially in two minds about editing a special issue on 'stigma'. The term, it seemed to me... more I was initially in two minds about editing a special issue on 'stigma'. The term, it seemed to me, was one too often applied uncritically to bodily conditions–especially in relation to leprosy–as a vague gloss for a qualitatively diverse range of negative social reactions and attitudes, as well as a description of how they might be experienced.
Summary Synoptic life history accounts and case studies of people with leprosy have tended to fol... more Summary Synoptic life history accounts and case studies of people with leprosy have tended to follow conventionalised narrative forms, with the onset of leprosy causing a violent rupture in otherwise positively construed life courses. Many of those I worked with in India, well-versed in relating their stories to donor agencies, were also aware of the power of such narratives to access funding.
ABSTRACT This paper sets out to illustrate via ethnographic example how an NGO's official intenti... more ABSTRACT This paper sets out to illustrate via ethnographic example how an NGO's official intentions are regularly subverted–wilfully or otherwise–by the competing political and personal interests of various stakeholders, often with unpredictable consequences.
Abstract: Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in India, this article... more Abstract: Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in India, this article argues that certain impairments, in certain social contexts, are simultaneously disabling and enabling. This paradox poses difficult challenges, not only for those working with individuals affected with leprosy, but for disability activists and policy-makers. Key Words: social anthropology, leprosy, South India
Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners—they are people "In this book you will meet ... more Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners—they are people
"In this book you will meet the world’s most oppressed people and converse in a reflective cross-disciplinary way about their modes of life, their vulnerability and their resilience. Kudos for James Staples and his team who have brought these lives to light and created the best sort of policy relevant research. "
- —Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University
"Here are fine-grained accounts of survival strategies on the very margins of poor societies. A new generation of anthropologists and development planners bear witness to the resilience and resourcefulness of some of the most impoverished people in the world. Anyone who wants to understand, and to help, should read this book. "
- Adam Kuper, Brunel University
living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses. In Livelihoods on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic research to cut through the conventional narratives that romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go beyond the trendy “sustainable livelihoods” approach to development to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually wield over their own lives and the broader socio-political constraints that persistently push them to the margins. Making these multi-level connections across a wide range of world regions and situations, this volume shows how the micro-concerns of ordinary people might usefully guide the macro-concerns of governments, NGOs, and global institutions who are engineering large-scale social and economic development programs. Livelihoods at the Margins is an engaging and eye-opening read for undergraduate and graduate students studying development in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines, as well as a useful tool for developments studies researchers and practitioners.
Peculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained percept... more Peculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained perception that people affected by leprosy are victims of the most terrible scourge imaginable. The experiences of those living in Bethany—a self-established leprosy community in South India—tell rather different, more nuanced, stories about what it is like to have leprosy at the onset of the twenty-first century. In this richly ethnographic portrait of Bethany people’s lives—whether at home in the leprosy colony, away begging in Mumbai or representing their histories through drama performance—James Staples explores how this apparently powerless group appropriates, embodies and redefines dominant ideas about caste, religion, the human body and Indian ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. They do so, as the book also reveals, against the various backdrops of colonialism, missionary endeavour, vernacular Christianity and Hinduism, medical practices, development and the State. At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is declaring that leprosy as a public health problem has been globally eliminated, the narratives of those whose lives remain intricately affected by the disease are more than ever in need of telling. The people at the centre of this book are seeing their right to define their identities in relation to a particular disease—and to gain certain advantages from those identities—being slowly but forcefully eroded. They emerge not as victims but as a group ready to challenge existing power structures in order to represent themselves as a group with particular rights.
Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life i... more Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the pleasures to be had in Bombay’s red light district. But for all the joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das’s story unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship. Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is to be an Indian in contemporary India.
Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview, 2015