Assa Doron

Robin Jeffrey

How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics, and Ordinary Life in India

Cell Phone Nation

Garbage and Growth in India

Waste of a Nation

In India, you can still find the kabaadiwala, the rag-and-bone man. He wanders from house to house buying old newspapers, broken utensils, plastic bottles—anything for which he can get a little cash. This custom persists and recreates itself alongside the new economies and ecologies of consumer capitalism. Waste of a Nation offers an anthropological and historical account of India’s complex relationship with garbage. Countries around the world struggle to achieve sustainable futures. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey argue that in India the removal of waste and efforts to reuse it also lay waste to the lives of human beings. At the bottom of the pyramid, people who work with waste are injured and stigmatized as they deal with sewage, toxic chemicals, and rotting garbage. Terrifying events, such as atmospheric pollution and childhood stunting, that touch even the wealthy and powerful may lead to substantial changes in practices and attitudes toward sanitation. And innovative technology along with more effective local government may bring about limited improvements. But if a clean new India is to emerge as a model for other parts of the world, a “binding morality” that reaches beyond the current environmental crisis will be required. Empathy for marginalized underclasses—Dalits, poor Muslims, landless migrants—who live, almost invisibly, amid waste produced predominantly for the comfort of the better-off will be the critical element in India’s relationship with waste. Solutions will arise at the intersection of the traditional and the cutting edge, policy and practice, science and spirituality.

Alex Broom

Australian Research Council Future Fellow Assa Doron

The volume explores the interplay of local cultural and religious practices in the delivery and experiences of health in South Asia. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Critical Perspectives

Health, Culture and Religion in South Asia

Gender persists as a key site of social inequality globally, and within contemporary south Asian contexts, the cultural practices which make up masculinities remain vital for understanding everyday life and social relations. Yet masculinities, and their discontents, are an understudied and often misrepresented facet of gender relations and cultural dynamics. Gender and Masculinities offers a collection of chapters that seek to unravel the complex ideas, practices and concepts revolving around gender structures and masculinities in India and Sri Lanka.The contributions to this volume draw on a range of disciplines, including history, comparative literatures, religion, anthropology, and development studies to illuminate the key issues that have shaped our understanding of gender relations and masculinities over time and across a range of geographical areas. By carefully attending to historical and contemporary gender ideologies and practices in South Asia, this book provides a critical exploration of masculinities in their plurality, as shifting, culturally located and embedded in religious ideologies, power relations, the politics of nationalism, globalisation and economic struggles. The volume will attract scholars interested in history, anthropology, sociology, nationalism, colonialism, religion and kinship, and popular culture.This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Histories, Texts and Practices in India and Sri Lanka

Gender and Masculinities

Over just a decade in India, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare, unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized staple that even poor fisherman can afford. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey investigate the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history and explore the whole ecosystem of cheap mobile phones.

The Great Indian Phone Book

The cheap mobile phone is probably the most disruptive communications device in history, and in India its potential to stir up society is breath-taking. The number of phones in India increased more than twenty times in the last ten years, and by the end of 2012 India had more than 900 million mobile phone subscribers. The impact of the simplest version of the device has been deep. Village councils have banned unmarried girls from owning mobile phones. Families have debated whether new brides should surrender them. Cheap mobiles have become photo albums, music machines, databases, radios and flashlights. Religious images and uplifting messages continue to flood tens of millions of phones each day. Pornographers and criminals have found a tantalizing new tool. Political organizations have exploited a resource infinitely more effective than the printing press for carrying messages to workers, followers and voters. Cell Phone Nation masterfully probes the mobile phone universe in India – from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control Radio Frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives.'

Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India

This intriguing anthropological study investigates how the boatmen of Banaras have repositioned themselves within the traditional social organization and used their privileged position on the river to contest upper-caste and state domination. Assa Doron examines the evolution of the boatmen community, drawing on a variety of sources to illuminate the cultural politics of social and economic inequality in contemporary India. Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges offers insight into recent debates about the cultural and historical forms of social practice and resistance at the juncture between tradition and the global economy, and will therefore appeal not only to anthropologists, but to anyone working in the field of development studies, globalization, religion, politics and cultural studies.

Assa Doron

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