ABSTRACT

This book explores the experiential and affective dimensions of structural transformation in South Asia through contemporary and historical accounts of life, ageing, illness, and death.  

The contributions to this book include analyses from various regions in South Asia, and topics discussed uncover how people’s experiences of life, ageing, illness, and death are entangled with the technology of governance, biomedicine, neoliberal restructuring and other national/international policies. Structured in three parts – governance, technology, and citizenship; well-being and restructuring of the social; waiting, hesitation, and hope as attitudes in facing the precariousness and fundamental uncertainty of life – the book brings to light the ways in which people face and continue to engage with their own and others’ lives cautiously, waveringly, but with a sense of hope.  

A novel contribution to the study of how people struggle or navigate their lives through the conditions of inequity and precariousness in South Asia, this book will be of interest to researchers studying anthropology, sociology, history, medical and development studies of South Asia, as well as to those interested in cultural and social theory.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|14 pages

Making Up Leprosy in India

chapter 2|18 pages

‘The Burial of the Dead’

Symbolic Space and Identity Among the Muslims of Kolkata

chapter 3|15 pages

Conceiving De-kinning

Practices of Pre-birthing in IVF Clinics in India

chapter 4|17 pages

The Making and Unmaking of a New Biosocial Subject

Folk Ayurvedic Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights in Contemporary India

chapter 5|17 pages

Biological Citizenship and Ethnicity

Experiences of Sickle Cell Anaemia in the Tharu Community in Southwestern Nepal

chapter 6|19 pages

Family Size and Couple's Will

Evidence from Household Data of India

chapter 7|19 pages

Fluctuating Reproductive Practices in the Age of Precariousness

Birth Spacing in Contemporary Nepal

chapter 8|15 pages

Patching the Relation of Care

An Essay on Senility, Intimacy, and Old Age Allowance in Urban Sri Lanka

chapter 9|18 pages

Health and Ageing in Bhutan

How Can We Build a Sustainable Healthcare System for Senior Citizens?

chapter 11|10 pages

Precarity, Illness, and the Stigmatised Marginality

Living with Arsenicosis in the Bangladeshi Cultural Context

chapter 12|16 pages

Living with Bodily Contingency

Miscarriage Among Childless Women in India

chapter 13|18 pages

Displaced Death

Grief, Ambiguity, and Practices of Waiting in Post-War Sri Lanka

chapter 14|18 pages

Commemorating a Self-immolator

A Case Study of Responses to Self-Immolation in a Tibetan Refugee Society in India