Showing all 5 books
India and Its Visual Cultures is a comprehensive mapping and analysis of contemporary cultural artefacts and visual cultures through different approaches—iconographic, social, political, religious and so on. This book covers various media and their histories by studying visual representational systems, production and consumption of media and culture-specific understandings. Crucial questions about the usage of media in research are also addressed in the ...
Studies of Odisha have often been simplistic and condensed to notions of a relatively prosperous, urbanized centre in the plain along the sea vis-à-vis a backward 'hinterland'. Due to such notions of othering, Odisha beyond the coastal world-the largely Adivasi-populated highlands and ostensible backyard areas in coastal perspectives-has often been relegated to the background of both scholarly and popular imagination. Highland Odisha inverts such othering ...
The chronicles of the royal family of Bonai—now a sub-division of Sundargarh district in Odisha—are memories of the past complex relations between overlords and tribal chiefs and between gods and communities. The chronicles were produced, modified and fabricated under specific historic circumstances stimulated by internal and external factors. They reflect the wider socio-religious context that in turn shaped them. They begin with the conquering of ...
Marriage stands at the centre-point of one’s life-cycle and epitomizes the relationship between two individuals or groups. It denotes, generally, long-term bonds and commitments, in which a relationship with the Divine, for instance, a relationship between villages and their local village Goddesses, is implicitly included. This book is a study of marriage in India. It begins by presenting the concept of marriage in a wide Indian framework. The book discusses ...
Ethnographic literature, with its emphasis on tribal communities, has to a large extent ignored the Aghrias, a peasant community of Western Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Questions of cultural change and Hinduization, extension of state structures and the problems of transitions in tribal and caste societies have mostly been discussed in anthropological studies from the angle of individual tribes and immigrating Brahmins or from the level of little kingdoms. There is ...