Unfamiliar Relations

Unfamiliar Relations restores the family and its many forms and meanings to a central place in the history of South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In her incisive introduction, Indrani Chatterjee argues that the recent wealth of scholarship on ethnicity, sexuality, gender, imperialism, and patriarchy in South Asia during the colonial period often overlooks careful historical analysis of the highly contested concept of family. Together, the essays in this book demolish "family" as an abstract concept in South Asian colonial history, demonstrating its exceedingly different meanings across temporal and geographical space. The scholarship in this volume reveals a far more complex set of dynamics than a simple binary between indigenous and colonial forms and structures. It approaches this study from the pre-colonial period on, rather than backwards as has been the case with previous scholarship. Topics include a British colonial officer who married a Mughal noblewoman and converted to Islam around the turn of the nineteenth century, the role gossip and taboo play in the formation of Indian family history, and an analysis of social relations in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands.

During the last 10 years, more and more linguistic and psycholinguistic research has been devoted to the study of discourse and written texts. Much of this research deals with the markers that underline the connections and the breaks between clauses and sentences plus the use of these markers -- by adults and children -- in the production and comprehension of oral and written material. In this volume, major observations and theoretical views from both sides of the Atlantic are brought together to appeal to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, and speech therapists. The volume presents contributions from researchers interested specifically in adult language and from others concerned with developmental aspects of language. Some contributors deal primarily with production, whereas others concentrate on comprehension. Some direct their attention to oral discourse while others focus on written texts. To preserve overall coherence, however, the contributors were given the following recommendations: * With regard to the level of linguistic analysis, the emphasis should be on the clause level -- more particularly, on the relationships between clauses. * Special emphasis should also be placed on linguistic markers (e.g., connectives, markers of segmentation, punctuation). * An overview of a given field of research should be offered, and current research should be put into perspective. * For contributors in the developmental field, attention should be paid to the fact that an account of the acquisition of some language functions throughout childhood should be included only if general principles of interclause relations that might be masked by the exclusive examination of adult evidence could be derived from it.

Paradoxically, if nature has always been a source of fear, civilisation – its other and at the same time the epitome of progress and order – has not only doubled fear itself, but also added its new sister, anxiety. In effect, the notions of civilisation, fear and anxiety can hardly be separated. Fear – either linked with anxiety or distinct from it – lies at the foundation of civilisation, which as much promises to shelter us from these afflictions as it does proliferate them. Confronted no longer with the adversary powers of nature, humans have to face now the adversary powers produced by their own endeavours and ideologies. Each effort aimed at attaining an equilibrium results in new, unexpected rifts and breaches into which fear and anxiety grow. Out of the games played between fear and civilisation there emerge new versions of the human subject: homo anxious, homo civilis, homo rationalis. This volume represents a collection of papers devoted to the many various relations between fear and society, culture and civilisation – both Western and Eastern, contemporary and past. The articles collected here approach the relationship of civilisation, fear, anxiety and the subject from multiple perspectives. Relating to modern critical thought, including that of Kant, Freud, Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, they investigate the objects, causes and effects of fear: reality, nature, reason, libidinal excess, atheism, critical discourse, technological advances, conspiracy, terrorism, capital punishment, the diversity of cultures, and the breakdown of civilisation as a whole: most of all, however, they explore the various shades of fear itself.

This book explains why some missionaries are being led to reject the missional models and many of the methodologies which are the most widely accepted by North American evangelical missionaries working in France. The author demonstrates that the evangelical Protestant missionaries' witness for Christ in Western Europe is often ineffective because their governing missional paradigm and their ministry methods, working in conjunction, tend to project a separatist image and isolate them from those they wish to influence for Christ. The author argues for the development of a missionary spirituality based upon the kenosis and an understanding of Christian unity based upon the perichoresis.

A groundbreaking view of South Asian history in the twentieth century that underlines the similarities and intertwined cultures of India and Pakistan "[A] definitive new 20th-century thematic history of the Indian subcontinent that rejects hegemonic conceptions of national 'difference.'"--Financial Times This radically original and ambitious history of the Indian subcontinent explores the region's unique twentieth-century history and foregrounds the deep connections, rather than the well-publicized fissures, between the cultures of India and Pakistan. Taking the partitions of British India rather than the two world wars as the century's inflection points, Joya Chatterji examines how issues of nationalism, internal and external migration, and technological innovation contributed to South Asia's tumultuous twentieth century. Chatterji weaves together elements of her autobiography and family history; stories of such legendary figures as Tagore, Jinnah, Gandhi, and Nehru; and, in particular, the accounts of the many who were left behind and marginalized in relentless nation-building projects. Chatterji examines the countries' mirroring patterns in state building, social and cultural life, modes of leisure, consumption, and oppression, and offers a timely course correction to our understanding of the dynamics of South Asian history. It reframes the events of the twentieth century that are continuing to play out in the present day.

An international journal of general philosophy.

Building on the thriving discussion on the role of attention within the phenomenological tradition, from Aron Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty to Bernhard Waldenfels, this book investigates the enigmatic role of attention as a faculty that enables change within subjective and intersubjective experience. The aim of the book is to reveal some characteristics of the processes in which subjects are unmade and remade, and to highlight how we are able to change our relation to an empirical world that nevertheless has unity and constancy in our perception.

Includes Report of the executive committee for 1887/88-1914/15; list of members in each volume.

List of members in each volume.

"Konrad has produced an exceptionally interesting and totally original book . . . a major contribution to social theory." - Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge University Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience - the donors on the one side and the ever-hopeful IVF recipients on the other - Konrad shows how one dimension of the new reproductive technologies involves an unfamiliar relatedness between nameless and untraceable procreative strangers. Offsetting informants' local narratives against traditional Western folk models of the 'sexed' reproductive body, the book challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying conventional biomedical discourse of altruistic donation that clinicians and others promote as "gifts of life." It brings together a wide variety of literatures from social anthropology, social theory, cultural studies of science and technology, and feminist bioethics to discuss the relationship between recent developments in biotechnology and changing conceptions of personal origins, genealogy, kinship, biological ownership and notions of bodily integrity.