A Shah
Biographic Data
| ID | 43840 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Shah |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Shah |
| SIGNATURE | SHAH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1233-6516 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 723 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Equity Analysis of a Reproductive Health Association
When decolonization is hijacked
This article asks how we should reconceptualize decolonization when it is hijacked by authoritarian/fascist forces. It focuses on the notorious Bhima Koregaon case in India in which 16 intellectuals/human rights defenders from across the country were imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists. It shows how, on the one hand, decolonization is hijacked by the Hindu authoritarian regime and, on the other hand, colonial artifacts are resymbolized…
Local Wisdom of Vernacular Settlements
Natural disasters pose a serious threat to human life, and understanding mitigation is key to reducing their negative impact. This research explores the role of folklore as a means of instilling an understanding of disaster mitigation. It examines how values in folklore can shape the attitudes and actions of the community regarding disaster mitigation. In reality, the significant role of folklore in instilling an understanding of disaster mitigat…
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK medical education. A nationwide student survey
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the delivery of medical education across the UK, with the majority of face-to-face teaching cancelled during the first wave, and medical schools consequently making varied adaptations to education delivery. To identify and share effective adaptations, we conducted a cross-sectional, online survey (COVID Med-Ed) between 20th May and 31st August 2020 which divided undergraduate teaching by GMC “Outc…
Why I Write
Why write? The spaces of intellectual dissidence once provided by universities-promoting disinterested inquiry, encouraging critical analysis, challenging conventional wisdoms-are increasingly controlled, if not squeezed out. A lethal mix of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism is unfolding in different combinations around the world, and one of its key targets of attack is intellectual freedom. It is pressing for academics as …
An Ethnography of the Parsees of India
For an anthropological theory of praxis
Across the globe, we are seeing a popular shift of appeal from a liberal‐humanitarian imagination of the world, or even a communist‐socialist ideal, to one that is more conservative and often called ‘right‐wing populist’. In the ethnographic context analysed here, a utopian movement for revolutionary social change, led by Marx‐Lenin and Mao‐inspired Naxalite guerrillas, that once had a wide appeal in parts of India, is superseded by a more conser…
Black lives matter, capital, and ideology
Piketty's propositions for arresting inequality are discussed through the lens of racism/casteism. We focus on the case of India's George Floyds-the persistence of caste and tribe oppression under economic growth in India-through the insights of our long-term ethnographic research. We show that inequalities are intimately tied to dynamics of capitalist accumulation in which racial/ethnic/caste/tribe and gender difference is crucial. We argue for …
What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries
What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Zooming out from the mud huts of indigenous communities in the forested hills of eastern India, this article compares three different models of leadership and democracy: liberal electoral democracy; Marxist-Leninist Maoist democracy; and democracy by sortition - the random selection of rotating leaders. The significance of sortition is introduced into discussions of democracy in India (showing connectio…
Ethical dimensions of stigma and discrimination in Nepal during Covid-19 pandemic
Explaining Modi
Migration and the invisible economies of care
This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) - differences that are mobilised for accumulation. L…
Conjugated oppression within contemporary capitalism
Neoliberal globalisation has resulted in the bypassing of agrarian transition-led industrialisation and classic proletarianisation, and class-for-itself class struggles are rare. Drawing on analyses of class relations, racism and other forms of social oppression, this contribution explores how processes of 'conjugated oppression' are central to the spread of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on India and on how the co-constitution of class re…
Naxalbari at its Golden Jubilee
There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that ha…
Ethnography
This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research-participant observation-to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is pr…
New ethnomedicinal claims from Gujjar and Bakerwals tribes of Rajouri and Poonch districts of Jammu and Kashmir, India
David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree
David Mosse’s The Saint in the Banyan Tree is a scholarly feat of a kind that we don’t often see today. Placed in an Anthropology of Christianity series, this is a must-read for anyone interested in Indian history, Dalits, caste and social transformation. The book combines rich historical research on Christianity in Tamil Nadu spanning four centuries alongside fieldwork data collected over the last three decades in a village Mosse calls ‘Alapuram…
The World Before Her
La lutte révolutionnaire des maoïstes continue en Inde
Alpa Shah fait partie des rares chercheurs qui ont observé, de près et sur la durée, le mouvement maoïste qui fait rage au centre de l'Inde. Elle offre ici une vision à la fois panoramique et engagée de ce mouvement et de la contre-offensive que lui oppose l'État indien
The muck of the past
This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism whe…
Screening of various botanical extracts for antioxidant activity using DPPH free radical method
Aiming at the exploration of herbal use by society, crude extracts of the seeds of some commonly used medicinal plants (Vitis vinifera, Tamarindus indica and Glycin max) were screened for their free radical scavenging properties using ascorbic acid as standard antioxidant. Free radical scavenging activity was evaluated using 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical. The overall antioxidant activity of grape seeds (Vitis vinifera) was the…
Conservative force or contradictory resource? Education and affirmative action in Jharkhand, India
This article explores the combination of education and affirmative action in challenging historic inequalities faced by adivasis, or indigenous peoples, living in a remote region of Eastern India. We show how the combined effects of education and affirmative action can act as a ‘contradictory resource’. On the one hand, policies of affirmative action are enabling young educated adivasis – the children of subsistence farmers and manual labourers –…
Response to Nandini Sundar's Response to ‘The Tensions Over Citizenship in a Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Situation
Affirmative action and political economic transformations
This article proposes an anthropology of affirmative action that is embedded in analysis of the wider political economic transformations in which affirmative action policies emerge. It is argued that this historically situated approach enables analyses of the relative effects of affirmative action on processes of socio economic marginalization. The focus of the article is on the combination of preferential treatment policies and the provision of …
The practices, policies, and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia
This is the introduction to a special section of Focaal that includes seven articles on the anthropology of affirmative action in South Asia. The section promotes the sustained, critical ethnographic analysis of affirmative action measures adopted to combat historical inequalities around the world. Turning our attention to the social field of affirmative action opens up new fronts in the anthropological effort to understand the state by carefully…
Migration and the invisible economies of care
This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) - differences that are mobilised for accumulation. L…
Ethnography
This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research-participant observation-to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is pr…
Conjugated oppression within contemporary capitalism
Neoliberal globalisation has resulted in the bypassing of agrarian transition-led industrialisation and classic proletarianisation, and class-for-itself class struggles are rare. Drawing on analyses of class relations, racism and other forms of social oppression, this contribution explores how processes of 'conjugated oppression' are central to the spread of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on India and on how the co-constitution of class re…
The labour of love
Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary space of freedom to escape p…
The Dark Side of Indigeneity
In the last two decades transnational concerns over indigenous people, indigenous rights and indigenous development has reignited a history of heated debate shrouding indigeneity. This article analyses these debates in the context of the anthropology and historiography of indigeneity in India. From the production of 'tribes of mind' to the policies that have encouraged people to identify themselves as 'Scheduled Tribes', or 'adivasis', the articl…
The intimacy of insurgency
The Maoist movement has been presented as one of the most powerful forces of resistance against policies of economic liberalization in India. This paper explores how and why the movement has spread in recent years. Analysing beyond theories explaining insurgent action in terms of coercion, greed or grievance, the article draws on long-term ethnographic research in a Maoist guerrilla zone to explore an important aspect of mobilization that has bee…
Keeping the state away
This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and soc…
Markets of Protection
This article explores the continuities between the local state and the 'terrorist' extreme left-wing armed guerrilla Naxalite movement, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), in Jharkhand, Eastern India. The article shows how the MCC gained grassroots support by having greater control over a 'market of protection', and not through a shared ideology. This protection is a 'doubleedged commodity' - it is protection to access the informal economy of the …
The tensions over liberal citizenship in a Marxist revolutionary situation
In recent years, liberal concepts of citizenship have been appropriated in the Indian subcontinent by various sections of the urban bourgeoisie, in particular, left-leaning intellectuals and activists, to make claims off the state on behalf of their poorer rural (sometimes urban) counterparts. In the context of the struggle between the Indian Government and the Maoist revolution, citizenship has provided a convenient means for civil liberties gro…
Morality, Corruption and the State
n Corruption is analysed by addressing the interrelations between the moral and political economy regulating state-based welfare provision in Jharkhand, India. On the one hand, the article focuses on the rural elite to show that `corrupt? practices are not just guided by financial utility but also by non-material interests, underpinned by a multivarious moral economy. On the other hand, the article shows that the poorest in the rural areas (adiva…
The muck of the past
This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism whe…
Introduction
This special issue is concerned with agrarian questions inIndia and their importance for, and impact on, political analyses and strategies of theIndian Left. In the 1970s, the development of Left politics generated the modes of production debate and many of the communist parties used their interpretations of agrarian change then to guide theirIndian path to socialism. More than 40 years on, ongoing changes in economic and social relations in the …
Windows into a revolution
The Agrarian Question in a Maoist Guerrilla Zone
As an object of ethnographic enquiry, this paper explores the significance of the modes of production debates for the radical Left in India. Its aim is modest: to investigate whether the analysis of the Indian economy by the underground Communist Party of India (Maoist), or the Naxalites, maps on to agrarian transformations in the heart of their revolutionary struggle, in one of their guerrilla zones in Jharkhand. The Maoist concern with the agra…
When decolonization is hijacked
This article asks how we should reconceptualize decolonization when it is hijacked by authoritarian/fascist forces. It focuses on the notorious Bhima Koregaon case in India in which 16 intellectuals/human rights defenders from across the country were imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists. It shows how, on the one hand, decolonization is hijacked by the Hindu authoritarian regime and, on the other hand, colonial artifacts are resymbolized…
Introduction
Why I Write
Why write? The spaces of intellectual dissidence once provided by universities-promoting disinterested inquiry, encouraging critical analysis, challenging conventional wisdoms-are increasingly controlled, if not squeezed out. A lethal mix of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism is unfolding in different combinations around the world, and one of its key targets of attack is intellectual freedom. It is pressing for academics as …
Alcoholics Anonymous
From millenarian movements to the spread of Hindu rightwing militancy, attacks on adivasi (or tribal) consumption of alcohol have gone hand-in-hand with the project of 'civilizing the savage'. Emphasizing the agency and consciousness of adivasi political mobilization, subaltern studies scholarship has historically depicted adivasis as embracing and propelling these reformist measures, marking them as a challenge to the social structure. This pape…
In search of certainty in revolutionary India
Naxalbari at its Golden Jubilee
There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that ha…
Introduction - A Double-edged Sword
Conservative force or contradictory resource? Education and affirmative action in Jharkhand, India
This article explores the combination of education and affirmative action in challenging historic inequalities faced by adivasis, or indigenous peoples, living in a remote region of Eastern India. We show how the combined effects of education and affirmative action can act as a ‘contradictory resource’. On the one hand, policies of affirmative action are enabling young educated adivasis – the children of subsistence farmers and manual labourers –…
In the Shadows of the State
What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries
What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Zooming out from the mud huts of indigenous communities in the forested hills of eastern India, this article compares three different models of leadership and democracy: liberal electoral democracy; Marxist-Leninist Maoist democracy; and democracy by sortition - the random selection of rotating leaders. The significance of sortition is introduced into discussions of democracy in India (showing connectio…
The practices, policies, and politics of transforming inequality in South Asia
This is the introduction to a special section of Focaal that includes seven articles on the anthropology of affirmative action in South Asia. The section promotes the sustained, critical ethnographic analysis of affirmative action measures adopted to combat historical inequalities around the world. Turning our attention to the social field of affirmative action opens up new fronts in the anthropological effort to understand the state by carefully…
A tribute to Paul Hendrich
Employment and Unemployment in India
On the role of some nations
Some Reflections on Sociological Research and Teaching in India
Cet article dresse un etat de la sociologie indienne qui connait un essor continu depuis les annees 1950. Pour l'avenir de la discipline, l'A. indique dans quelles directions pourraient s'approfondir les etudes dans les champs suivants : les etudes villageoises ; les castes ; le mariage, la famille, les relations intersexe ; les etudes urbaines ; la sociologie des religions. Puis il decrit l'evolution de la profession de sociologue ainsi que cell…
Power plays
This article is based on a performance on the power plays of research. It is a self‐critical examination of the practices involved in submitting an undergraduate dissertation. The original performance was a dialogue between myself, reflecting on the specific experiences of my dissertation, and Craig Jeffrey, who punctuated it with more general aspects of the dissertation process. It was written for an audience of undergraduate geographers at the …
In memory of M.N. Srinivas
The labour of love
Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary space of freedom to escape p…
Markets of Protection
This article explores the continuities between the local state and the 'terrorist' extreme left-wing armed guerrilla Naxalite movement, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), in Jharkhand, Eastern India. The article shows how the MCC gained grassroots support by having greater control over a 'market of protection', and not through a shared ideology. This protection is a 'doubleedged commodity' - it is protection to access the informal economy of the …
Introduction - A Double-edged Sword
The Dark Side of Indigeneity
In the last two decades transnational concerns over indigenous people, indigenous rights and indigenous development has reignited a history of heated debate shrouding indigeneity. This article analyses these debates in the context of the anthropology and historiography of indigeneity in India. From the production of 'tribes of mind' to the policies that have encouraged people to identify themselves as 'Scheduled Tribes', or 'adivasis', the articl…
Life and words
Keeping the state away
This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and soc…
Social movements
Nash, June ( ed .). Social movements: an anthropological reader . xiv, 344 pp., bibliogrs . Oxford, New York : Blackwell Publishing , 2004 . £60.00 (cloth), £17.99 (paper) In recent years there has been a re-emergence of interest in social movements – the collective resistance by people that rests in the terrain between mass revolution and everyday forms of resistance, and that offers marginalized people an alternative political voice to that whi…
A brief history of neoliberalism - By David Harvey
Language, games and the role of interpreters in psychiatric diagnosis
British society is becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse. This poses a major challenge to mental health services charged with the responsibility to work in ways that respect cultural and linguistic difference. In this paper we investigate the problems of interpretation in the diagnosis of depression using a thought experiment to demonstrate important features of language-games, an idea introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in hi…
Morality, Corruption and the State
n Corruption is analysed by addressing the interrelations between the moral and political economy regulating state-based welfare provision in Jharkhand, India. On the one hand, the article focuses on the rural elite to show that `corrupt? practices are not just guided by financial utility but also by non-material interests, underpinned by a multivarious moral economy. On the other hand, the article shows that the poorest in the rural areas (adiva…
In search of certainty in revolutionary India
Windows into a revolution
Asian voices in a postcolonial age - By Susan Bayly
Ghosts of war in Vietnam - By Heonik Kwon
In the Shadows of the State
In the Shadows of the State
Alcoholics Anonymous
From millenarian movements to the spread of Hindu rightwing militancy, attacks on adivasi (or tribal) consumption of alcohol have gone hand-in-hand with the project of 'civilizing the savage'. Emphasizing the agency and consciousness of adivasi political mobilization, subaltern studies scholarship has historically depicted adivasis as embracing and propelling these reformist measures, marking them as a challenge to the social structure. This pape…
Éliminer la classe, la caste et l'indigénéité dans l'Inde maoïste
Cet article explore les tensions qui apparaissent lorsqu'un projet politique propose clairement de restructurer les formes qui permettent la coopération entre individus, et de s'écarter pour ce faire des formes établies d'organisation de la société. Il se concentre sur les activités clandestines du Parti communiste de l'inde (marxiste), ou pci (m), plus connu sous le nom « mouvement naxalite », qui mène depuis plus de quarante ans une lutte armée…
Screening of various botanical extracts for antioxidant activity using DPPH free radical method
Aiming at the exploration of herbal use by society, crude extracts of the seeds of some commonly used medicinal plants (Vitis vinifera, Tamarindus indica and Glycin max) were screened for their free radical scavenging properties using ascorbic acid as standard antioxidant. Free radical scavenging activity was evaluated using 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical. The overall antioxidant activity of grape seeds (Vitis vinifera) was the…
Political science (37 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (30 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (23 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (19 works) · Political economy (16 works) · History (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (11 works)