Patricia Jeffery
Biographic Data
| ID | 3583390 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patricia Jeffery |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patricia |
| FAMILY NAME | Jeffery |
| SIGNATURE | JEFFERY P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 317 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Muslim Woman/Muslim women: Lived experiences beyond religion and gender in South Asia and its diasporas
Images of the ‘Muslim Woman’ – passive, cloistered, and oppressed – have a long and inglorious history and have often been deployed in wider political debates in South Asia and beyond. The ground realities, however, tell a different story: there is no such person as the ‘Muslim Woman’ and this Special Issue presents papers that highlight the diversity of Muslim women’s lives within South Asia and among Muslim women of South Asian heritage in the …
Portraits of Women’s Paid Domestic-Care Labour: Ethnographic Studies from Globalizing India
Our introduction to this Special Issue draws out themes from all four articles which focus on India’s domestic-care economy: women’s paid domestic labour, care work and surrogacy. Through fine-grained ethnographic detail, all the articles nuance questions around agency and resistance, and actively challenge the ‘passive victim’ stereotype that continues to be the primary imaginary in many representations of domestic-care workers. We describe how …
A Brief History of Incivility in Rural Postcolonial India: Caste, Religion, and Anthropology
Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Part…
Plain Tales from the Plains
Barriers to higher education: Commonalities and contrasts in the experiences of Hindu and Muslim young women in urban Bengaluru
Gender inequalities in educational attainment have attracted considerable attention and this article aims to contribute to our understanding of young women's access to higher education. The article is based on our in-depth interviews with 26 Hindu and Muslim young women attending colleges in urban Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), south India, and explores the barriers they confronted in fulfilling their aspirations. We highlight the similarities a…
Contextualizing Women's Agency in Marital Negotiations: Muslim and Hindu Women in Karnataka, India
We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women's educational attainments and women's exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role …
Supply-and-demand demographics: Dowry, daughter aversion and marriage markets in contemporary north India
The gendered character of India's fertility decline has attracted considerable academic attention. In this paper, I offer a critique of the arguments of some demographers about the linkages between dowry, daughter aversion and the marriage squeeze that predict that increasing shortages of marriageable women will result in declines in dowry. I argue that such economistic readings seriously oversimplify the complexities of marriage arrangement ‘on …
Islamic Reform in South Asia
The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practices, this volume also breaks away from the dominant trend of mainstream ethnographic work, which cele…
Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia
Underserved and overdosed? Muslims and the Pulse Polio Initiative in rural north India
During the 2000s, confirmed polio cases in India have been increasingly localised in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar, especially amongst Muslim children. Muslims have also been at the sharp end of the Pulse Polio Initiative (PPI) and the associated ‘Underserved Strategy’ designed to counter civilian resistance to the programme. Our critique of the PPI draws on long-term research in rural UP and focuses on the programme's socio-political implications…
Joining-up thinking: Loss in childbearing from inter-disciplinary perspectives
Only when the boat has started sinking: A maternal death in rural north India
This paper uses a close reading of villagers' responses to the death in childbirth of a Muslim woman to raise questions about India's current policy emphasis on institutional delivery as a means of reducing maternal mortality. After introducing the context and methods of our research, we describe recent policy interventions related to maternal health, including the National Rural Health Mission established in 2005. We then outline villagers' comm…
School and madrasah education: Gender and the strategies of Muslim young men in rural north India
This paper explores the cultural and economic strategies of educated but un/under‐employed young Muslim men aged between 20 and 34 in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, north India. Drawing on Connell's gender theory, the paper demonstrates how economic and political forces shape Muslim young men's strategies. The paper distinguishes between ‘school‐educated’ men, some of whom had studied in madrasahs for long periods, and the ‘madrasah‐educated…
Money itself discriminates: Obstetric emergencies in the time of liberalisation
Citizenship rights in India are being transformed under economic liberalisation. In this article, we use obstetric crises to provide an entry point to explore recent changes in people's access to health care and their understandings of their civic rights and entitlements. We draw on our research in rural Bijnor district (Uttar Pradesh) between 1982 and 2005. Over this period, the state has increasingly failed to provide a safety net of emergency …
Dalit Revolution? New Politicians in Uttar Pradesh, India
This paper uses recent field research to challenge the widely held view that a “Dalit revolution” is occurring in North India. Drawing on two years' ethnographic research in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, the authors uncover the growing importance of a generation of local political activists among Dalits (former untouchables) while also showing that these young men have not been able to effect a broad structural transformation at the local l…
Disputing Contraception: Muslim Reform, Secular Change and Fertility
In South Asia, Muslim reformers have often attempted to 'rationalize' and gentrify the everyday behaviour of ordinary Muslims. Yet, despite the existence of discussions of contraceptive techniques in theyūnān-ī tibbcurricula of 19th century India and the apparent affinity between rationalism and fertility regulation, contraception was rarely discussed in public debates involving Muslim reformers. In this paper we discuss some of the relationships…
Degrees Without Freedom: Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India
Degrees Without Freedom? re-evaluates debates on education, modernity, and social change in contemporary development studies and anthropology. Education is widely imputed with the capacity to transform the prospects of the poor. But in the context of widespread unemployment in rural north India, it is better understood as a contradictory resource, providing marginalized youth with certain freedoms but also drawing them more tightly into systems o…
Safe Motherhood Initiatives: Contributions from Small-scale Studies
In India in 2000 between 115000 and 170000 women died in childbirth-about one-quarter of all maternal deaths worldwide. Far from declining over the 1990s maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality rates in India have at best plateaued at worst increased. Regional class and caste inequalities remain far too high. The Millennium Development Goal for the reduction of maternal mortality means that by 2015 the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) should …
Unmonitored Intrapartum Oxytocin Use in Home Deliveries: Evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India
Intrapartum use of oxytocin should entail controlled dosages administered through infusion, continual monitoring of mother and fetus and surgical back-up, since several adverse outcomes have been reported. However, in Uttar Pradesh, north India, small-scale ethnographic studies as well as a large-scale retrospective survey have established that unmonitored intramuscular oxytocin injections are commonly given to birthing mothers to augment labour …
Reproducing Difference? Schooling, Jobs, and Empowerment in Uttar Pradesh, India
When schooling fails: Young men, education and low-caste politics in rural north India
Scholarly discussions of formal education in the global South are increasingly moving away from a narrow focus on human capital to consider the meanings that people attach to 'being educated'. This article advances current debates on the social construction of educational value in South Asia by examining how educated Chamar (Dalit) young men reflect on their education in the face of poor occupational outcomes. Since the 1960s, Dalits' investment …
A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India
Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white‐collar occupations …
Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men in North India
This article considers the capacity of formal education to undermine established processes of caste and class reproduction in an area of north India, with particular reference to the views and strategies of educated Dalit young men. It draws on quantitative and qualitative research conducted by the authors in a village in Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). We discuss how educated Dalit young men perceive education, how they seek to use …
Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: A Girls' Islamic Course' and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh
Girls' education has been enduringly controversial in north India, and the disputes of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century still echo in debates about girls' education in contemporary India. In this paper, we reflect on the education of rural Muslim girls in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh (UP), by examining an Islamic course for girls [Larkiyon kā Islālmī Course], written in Urdu and widely used in madrasahs …
A Population Out of Control? Myths About Muslim Fertility in Contemporary India
When schooling fails: Young men, education and low-caste politics in rural north India
Scholarly discussions of formal education in the global South are increasingly moving away from a narrow focus on human capital to consider the meanings that people attach to 'being educated'. This article advances current debates on the social construction of educational value in South Asia by examining how educated Chamar (Dalit) young men reflect on their education in the face of poor occupational outcomes. Since the 1960s, Dalits' investment …
A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India
Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white‐collar occupations …
Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men in North India
This article considers the capacity of formal education to undermine established processes of caste and class reproduction in an area of north India, with particular reference to the views and strategies of educated Dalit young men. It draws on quantitative and qualitative research conducted by the authors in a village in Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). We discuss how educated Dalit young men perceive education, how they seek to use …
Islamization, Gentrification and Domestication: A Girls' Islamic Course' and Rural Muslims in Western Uttar Pradesh
Girls' education has been enduringly controversial in north India, and the disputes of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century still echo in debates about girls' education in contemporary India. In this paper, we reflect on the education of rural Muslim girls in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh (UP), by examining an Islamic course for girls [Larkiyon kā Islālmī Course], written in Urdu and widely used in madrasahs …
Only when the boat has started sinking: A maternal death in rural north India
This paper uses a close reading of villagers' responses to the death in childbirth of a Muslim woman to raise questions about India's current policy emphasis on institutional delivery as a means of reducing maternal mortality. After introducing the context and methods of our research, we describe recent policy interventions related to maternal health, including the National Rural Health Mission established in 2005. We then outline villagers' comm…
Female infanticide and amniocentesis
Money itself discriminates: Obstetric emergencies in the time of liberalisation
Citizenship rights in India are being transformed under economic liberalisation. In this article, we use obstetric crises to provide an entry point to explore recent changes in people's access to health care and their understandings of their civic rights and entitlements. We draw on our research in rural Bijnor district (Uttar Pradesh) between 1982 and 2005. Over this period, the state has increasingly failed to provide a safety net of emergency …
A Population Out of Control? Myths About Muslim Fertility in Contemporary India
Reproducing Difference? Schooling, Jobs, and Empowerment in Uttar Pradesh, India
A Uniform Customary Code? Marital breakdown and women's economic entitlements in rural Bijnor
Drawing on research in rural Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh, this article explores some of the implications of the Shah Bano controversy in the mid-1980s, and of the associated communalisation of politics, for local-level communal and gender politics. It makes three main points. First, the crucial parallels in the domestic lives of Hindu and Muslim women in rural Bijnor undermine Hindu Right assertions that Muslim women are uniquely oppre…
Labour pains and labour power: Women and childbearing in India
Disputing Contraception: Muslim Reform, Secular Change and Fertility
In South Asia, Muslim reformers have often attempted to 'rationalize' and gentrify the everyday behaviour of ordinary Muslims. Yet, despite the existence of discussions of contraceptive techniques in theyūnān-ī tibbcurricula of 19th century India and the apparent affinity between rationalism and fertility regulation, contraception was rarely discussed in public debates involving Muslim reformers. In this paper we discuss some of the relationships…
Portraits of Women’s Paid Domestic-Care Labour: Ethnographic Studies from Globalizing India
Our introduction to this Special Issue draws out themes from all four articles which focus on India’s domestic-care economy: women’s paid domestic labour, care work and surrogacy. Through fine-grained ethnographic detail, all the articles nuance questions around agency and resistance, and actively challenge the ‘passive victim’ stereotype that continues to be the primary imaginary in many representations of domestic-care workers. We describe how …
Supply-and-demand demographics: Dowry, daughter aversion and marriage markets in contemporary north India
The gendered character of India's fertility decline has attracted considerable academic attention. In this paper, I offer a critique of the arguments of some demographers about the linkages between dowry, daughter aversion and the marriage squeeze that predict that increasing shortages of marriageable women will result in declines in dowry. I argue that such economistic readings seriously oversimplify the complexities of marriage arrangement ‘on …
Dalit Revolution? New Politicians in Uttar Pradesh, India
This paper uses recent field research to challenge the widely held view that a “Dalit revolution” is occurring in North India. Drawing on two years' ethnographic research in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, the authors uncover the growing importance of a generation of local political activists among Dalits (former untouchables) while also showing that these young men have not been able to effect a broad structural transformation at the local l…
Unmonitored Intrapartum Oxytocin Use in Home Deliveries: Evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India
Intrapartum use of oxytocin should entail controlled dosages administered through infusion, continual monitoring of mother and fetus and surgical back-up, since several adverse outcomes have been reported. However, in Uttar Pradesh, north India, small-scale ethnographic studies as well as a large-scale retrospective survey have established that unmonitored intramuscular oxytocin injections are commonly given to birthing mothers to augment labour …
Underserved and overdosed? Muslims and the Pulse Polio Initiative in rural north India
During the 2000s, confirmed polio cases in India have been increasingly localised in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar, especially amongst Muslim children. Muslims have also been at the sharp end of the Pulse Polio Initiative (PPI) and the associated ‘Underserved Strategy’ designed to counter civilian resistance to the programme. Our critique of the PPI draws on long-term research in rural UP and focuses on the programme's socio-political implications…
Joining-up thinking: Loss in childbearing from inter-disciplinary perspectives
Muslim Woman/Muslim women: Lived experiences beyond religion and gender in South Asia and its diasporas
Images of the ‘Muslim Woman’ – passive, cloistered, and oppressed – have a long and inglorious history and have often been deployed in wider political debates in South Asia and beyond. The ground realities, however, tell a different story: there is no such person as the ‘Muslim Woman’ and this Special Issue presents papers that highlight the diversity of Muslim women’s lives within South Asia and among Muslim women of South Asian heritage in the …
Barriers to higher education: Commonalities and contrasts in the experiences of Hindu and Muslim young women in urban Bengaluru
Gender inequalities in educational attainment have attracted considerable attention and this article aims to contribute to our understanding of young women's access to higher education. The article is based on our in-depth interviews with 26 Hindu and Muslim young women attending colleges in urban Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), south India, and explores the barriers they confronted in fulfilling their aspirations. We highlight the similarities a…
Social and political dominance in western UP: A response to Sudha Pai
In our critique of a recent article by Sudha Pai (CIS vol. 34, no. 2) we argue that she provides inadequate evidence to support her case that there has been a dramatic change in dominance relationships in western UP. We identify problems of evidence in her claims about the significance of rising education of Chamars, and in the consequences of the changes that have taken place. We also suggest that her account of dominance needs to consider the e…
School and madrasah education: Gender and the strategies of Muslim young men in rural north India
This paper explores the cultural and economic strategies of educated but un/under‐employed young Muslim men aged between 20 and 34 in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, north India. Drawing on Connell's gender theory, the paper demonstrates how economic and political forces shape Muslim young men's strategies. The paper distinguishes between ‘school‐educated’ men, some of whom had studied in madrasahs for long periods, and the ‘madrasah‐educated…
Safe Motherhood Initiatives: Contributions from Small-scale Studies
In India in 2000 between 115000 and 170000 women died in childbirth-about one-quarter of all maternal deaths worldwide. Far from declining over the 1990s maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality rates in India have at best plateaued at worst increased. Regional class and caste inequalities remain far too high. The Millennium Development Goal for the reduction of maternal mortality means that by 2015 the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) should …
A Brief History of Incivility in Rural Postcolonial India: Caste, Religion, and Anthropology
Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Part…
Contextualizing Women's Agency in Marital Negotiations: Muslim and Hindu Women in Karnataka, India
We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women's educational attainments and women's exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role …
Pakistani families in Bristol
Migrants and Refugees: Muslim and Christian Pakistani Families in Bristol
Frogs in a Well. Indian Women in Purdah
Pukhtun Economy and Society: Traditional Structure and Economic Development in a Tribal Society
Women, Work, and Property in North-West India
Indian Women in Purdah
Female infanticide and amniocentesis
Purdah. Muslimische Frauen in Indien
Class and Gender in India: Women and their Organizations In a South Indian City. Patricia Caplan
Labour pains and labour power: Women and childbearing in India
The empty kit: Modalities of learning and the politics of cross-cultural miscommunication
Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children
Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Child Survival.- I: Population, Fertility, and Child Survival.- Birth Planning in Rural China: A Cultural Account.- Fertility Change, Child Survival, and Child Development: Observations on a Rural Kenyan Community.- Food Taboos and Child Survival: A Case Study from the Coral Sea.- II: Infanticide: Culturally Sanctioned Child Abuse.- Female Infanticide and Child Neglect in Rural North India.- Infanticide Amon…
Labor Pains and Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India
Books
Philip E. Ogden and Paul E. White (eds), Migrants in Modern France: Population Mobility in the Later 19th and 20th Centuries London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 320 pp., £45.00 h.b. Hastings Donnan, Marriage among Muslims: Preference and Choice in Northern Pakistan Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 1988, 231 pp, $38.25 p.b. Malcolm Cross and Gad Heuman (eds), Labour in the Caribbean: from Emancipation To Independence Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbea…
Male outmigration and matri-weighted households: A case study of a Punjabi village in Pakistan
Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World
An American journalist provides insights into women's lives, and the traditions imposed on them, from arranged marriages to a husband's right to take his wife's life, in many Islamic countries. The women depicted - both single and married - are from a variety of backgrounds and environments, from power-broking, the jet-set and the professions, to rural villages, red-light districts and child-labour camps. Some of the women are content; some are r…
Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India
Roger and Patricia Jeffery are well known for their work on religion and gender in South Asia. In their latest book, a study of the demographic processes of two castes in rural north India, they ask why fertility levels are higher among the Muslim Sheikhs than the Hindu Jats. They conclude that explanations can only partially be attributed to gender relationships and religion, and it is the economic and political interests of both groups which ar…
Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India
On Misrepresentation in Academic Writing: Letter to Development and Change
Bollywood in Bijnor? Making an open university film in rural North India
This paper addresses the micro‐politics of filmmaking and is based on the authors’ experiences as academic consultants for an Open University film shot in two north Indian villages where the authors have worked since 1982. The consultant role entailed providing academic inputs, but also highlighted several uncomfortable issues. As members of the film crew, the authors engaged in crowd control, became gofers, and were required to behave in ways th…
Agency, Activism, and Agendas
Feminist activism in South Asia has contributed both to raising people's awareness of gender injustices and to directly combating them. In part, politicized religion may be a response to the challenges posed by feminist activism and by secular changes in the wider economy (Chhachhi, 1991). More certainly politicized religion has often been implicated in developments that are potentially deeply inimical to women's interests—and yet many women's en…
Social and political dominance in western UP: A response to Sudha Pai
In our critique of a recent article by Sudha Pai (CIS vol. 34, no. 2) we argue that she provides inadequate evidence to support her case that there has been a dramatic change in dominance relationships in western UP. We identify problems of evidence in her claims about the significance of rising education of Chamars, and in the consequences of the changes that have taken place. We also suggest that her account of dominance needs to consider the e…
A Uniform Customary Code? Marital breakdown and women's economic entitlements in rural Bijnor
Drawing on research in rural Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh, this article explores some of the implications of the Shah Bano controversy in the mid-1980s, and of the associated communalisation of politics, for local-level communal and gender politics. It makes three main points. First, the crucial parallels in the domestic lives of Hindu and Muslim women in rural Bijnor undermine Hindu Right assertions that Muslim women are uniquely oppre…
A Population Out of Control? Myths About Muslim Fertility in Contemporary India
A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India
Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex‐untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white‐collar occupations …
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (34 works) · Law (24 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Social science (14 works) · Geography (13 works)