By Assa Doron
This fascinating anthropological examine investigates how the boatmen of Banaras have repositioned themselves in the conventional social association and used their privileged place at the river to contest upper-caste and kingdom domination. the writer examines the evolution of the boatmen neighborhood, drawing on a number of assets to light up the cultural politics of social and fiscal inequality in modern India. lifestyles at the Ganga: Boatmen and the Ritual economic climate of Banaras deals perception into contemporary debates in regards to the cultural and ancient varieties of social perform and resistance on the juncture among culture and the worldwide financial system, and may accordingly charm not just to anthropologists, yet to someone operating within the box of improvement experiences, globalization, faith, politics and cultural stories.
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Extra resources for Life on the Ganga : boatmen and the ritual economy of Banaras
Sample text
Arriving in Banaras later that year to begin fieldwork, I chose Assi ghat at the southern edge of the city to begin my research. This was done for mainly practical reasons, which were related to my initial research question: What does it mean to be a boatman in Banaras? My question therefore restricted the study to the geographical location in which the 2 3 The Kumbh Mela is the largest religious gathering in India, occurring every three years, where pilgrims gather near the confluence of sacred rivers to perform ritual ablutions (snan).
3 While the complex cultural and political landscape of India has gone through many historical transformations, with every ruling power attempting to contain, survey and control it, the British colonial era sought to conceive India and Indian society, on a grand scale, with a systemic probing of all ‘Things Indian’ (Crooke 1906). Encountering the British The boatmen were one of the first groups to encounter the British as they entered the Indian subcontinent. Before the development of roads and railways, rivers were the main arteries of communication.
The second framework of meaning according to Giddens’ principle of the double hermeneutic concerns the ‘second order’ sociological concepts employed by the researcher to understand and interpret the 12 LIFE ON THE GANGA research results (Giddens 1984, 284). 8 More specifically, the anthropological history of India by Bernard Cohn (1998 [1987]), the scholarship of the Subaltern Studies Group and James Scott’s (1985; 1990) ethnographic history detailing everyday forms of resistance have been sources of inspiration for me.