Bücher der Reihe Routledge Focus on Modern Subjects

An ethnography of the lives of the super-rich housewives of Delhi, this book delineates the ways in which these elite women construct their class and femininity.

The Dazzle of the Digital is written in the context of digital technology's inextricable link with progress and modernity in India, with the COVID pandemic in the backdrop. Digital technology such as smartphones and the internet exemplify the popular ideal of a modernity where the proliferation of data and information seamlessly translates into knowledge and value. The authors attempt to wrestle with this impulsive conflation of the digital with the modern, and argue that the former can sometimes retard progress rather than foster it. They provide examples from various spheres - ranging from public service delivery to private markets - to unpack the pitfalls of a blinkered view on modernity. The book presents an objective take on the potential of digital technology, written with the hope that it will prompt greater societal reflection on technology as a lever for advancement, at a time when the march of everything digital is inexorable.

Scrupulously based in anthropology and history - and drawing on social theory and critical thought - this book revisits the disciplines, archives, and subjects of modernity.There are at least three interleaving emphases here. To begin with, the work rethinks institutionalized formations of anthropology and history - together with "archives" at large - as themselves intimating disciplines of modernity. Understood in the widest senses of the terms, these disciplines are constitutively contradictory.Moreover, the study interrupts familiar projections of modern subjects as molded a priori by a disenchanted calculus of interest and reason. It tracks instead the affective, embodied, and immanent attributes of our varied worlds as formative of subjects of modernity, sown into their substance and spirit.Finally, running through the book is a querying of entitlement and privilege that underlie social terrains and their scholarly apprehensions - articulating at once distinct elites, pervasive plutocracies, and modern "scholasticisms."

Fluid Modernity offers an innovative, encompassing, historical grasp of the politics of water in the Middle East in the context of modern capitalism and world politics. Drawing upon conceptions of power by Foucault and Agamben, it examines how water, through its modern capitalist production, is transformed into a water apparatus that binds people to power. In trans-boundary watercourses, states get involved in the formation of international governmentalities.The book revisits the history of fluid modernity in the Middle East from late Ottoman times to the present. It focuses on water conflict and cooperation between states (Israel and Arab states and Turkey, Syria and Iraq), on state policies towards subaltern subjects (Israel and Turkey in relation to Palestinians and Kurds, respectively) and on the water politics of rebellious movements. After a conceptual chapter discussing fluid modernity, the book traces water politics in the region in a diachronic perspective. It explores how water diplomacy, infrastructure loans, reservoir construction, discourses of sovereignty and conflict have weighed on the development of governance and governmentality in the region.Fluid Modernity will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers, academics and intellectuals interested in Middle East Studies, Hydropolitics, Water and Society, Geopolitics, Political Theory, Resistance as well as to NGOs dealing with water.