Disguise, Revelation and Copyright

Disassembling the South Indian Leper

Bibliographic Data

ID2252136
AuthorsJ Staples (0000-0002-2648-8636, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume9
Issue2
Pages295-315
Publication date2003-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9655.00151
OpenAlexW1977312785
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited41

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts - at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra - I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves

Aesthetics · Art · Begging · Epistemology · Ethnography · Leprosy · Personhood · Phenomenology (philosophy · Political science · Revelation · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub