Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic disease to tell a story about the enfolding––the absorption and regulation––of food in and about the body in Mumbai. Solomon’s book is a powerful ethnographic reflection on how factors held as exterior (local and global cuisine, evolving and competing norms regarding eating and body image) are wholly interiorized. …
…Figure 1: Propaganda materials rehearsing the curability of tuberculosis are produced by a variety of institutional actors across India. From left to right: poster from Christian Medical College, Vellore (accessed via US National Library of Medicine); logo from Government of India’s Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP); and poster from a series developed by the Indian Development
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages
An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas – “silent brewmasters” – to work their espresso machines. A Bangalore tech company boasts that it hires “physically challenged” workers only (118-121). Meanwhile, deaf adults in Bangalore complain that adult education at …
Anand Pandian’s Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation is a fascinating and truly inspired inquiry into questions of experience and the media through which experience is rendered (word, image, and sound) in and about Tamil cinema and beyond. Pandian walks a path where visions are realized between seen-ness and feltness, between openness and the limits of the frame. Much …
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India
by Bianca Brijnath
Berghahn Books, 2014, 240 pages
Bianca Brijnath’s book, Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India, offers a long-awaited, fresh insight into the lives and experiences of people with dementia and their caregivers in middle-class, middle-aged, educated Delhi-based families. Using the lens of critical …
Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern
by Kalpana Ram
University of Hawaii Press, 2013, 336 pages
Spirit possession is a familiar anthropological interest. But efforts to understand it through scholarly, secular thought often require some suspension of disbelief. Or, more disconcertingly, they simply avoid engaging with the phenomena on its own terms, looking to locate its …
