Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Towards Another Reason: Identity Politics and Ethical Worlds in South India

Towards Another Reason: Identity Politics and Ethical Worlds in South India

Demmer, Ulrich

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesIndian & South Asian History

ISBN10: 0199466815
ISBN13: 9780199466818
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Feb 28 2017
Pages: 417
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.60
Language: English
Locating the politics of ethical collective identities in postcolonial South India, this work explores the ways in which different cultural communities forge their self-understandings in terms of practical reason: with respect to ideas of what a good life truly is and how we should live ethically in practice. Drawing upon more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, the author discusses the ethical concepts, practices, and politics of the Adivasi community of Jēnu Kuŕmba, the state of Tamil Nadu, and the recently established religious discourse of the deity Sanesvara.

Values and conceptions of a good life of communities are constructed and articulated in ritual and political performances in public spaces. These rhetorical performances constitute what Foucault has called 'techniques of the self', where people imagine, debate, and shape their identities in a field of competing ethical concepts and imaginations. Analysing the acts of self-creation, hegemony, and cultural resistance in the given context, this anthropology of ethics gives us a crucial perspective in studying contemporary identity politics: that identities are constituted through both practical reason and political contestation.

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