Stories of poverty in India
An ethnographer reviews Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11624451 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erica Bornstein (Department of Anthropology University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Milwaukee WI 53201, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 180-186 |
| Publication date | 2014-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/amet.12068 |
| OpenAlex | W2118432885 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
Katherine Boo's work of literary nonfiction, Behind the Beautiful Forevers , is an insightful and tragic account of poverty in India. In this essay, I compare Boo's book with two books published in the same year, Akhil Gupta's ethnography Red Tape and Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis , a fictional account, to analyze representations of the poor and marginalized in an economically liberalized and rapidly growing India. While ethnography possesses the explanatory power of social theory, fiction and literary nonfiction relish the tragic consequences of social life that make for good stories
Art · Ethnography · Literature · Political science · Poverty · Power (physics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |