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BOYS WILL BE BOYS
₨ 6,922Sara Suleri Goodyear’s “Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, “Meatless Days intertwines the violent history of Pakistan’s independence with Suleri Goodyear’s most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In “Boys Will Be Boys, she returns–with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion–to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and preposterous” disposition).
Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys will be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the “Times of Karachi and the “Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the “Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also “preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father’s inalienable right to oppress his children.
Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter, “I will say to God, Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.
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THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS BOUNDARIES
₨ 18,875In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Harjot Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through a searching examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikh tradition was not concerned with establishing distinct religious boundaries. Most Sikhs recognized multiple identities grounded in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. Consequently, religious identities were highly blurred and several competing definitions of what constituted a Sikh were possible.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by social and cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity. The ethnocentric logic of a new elite dissolved alternative ideals under the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism.
A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this important book calls into question basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities. An essential book for the field of South Asian religions, this work is also an important contribution to cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies, and the history of religion in general.
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REGIONALISM AND RIVALRY
₨ 21,706As Japan’s newfound economic power leads to increased political power, there is concern that Japan may be turning East Asia into a regional economic bloc to rival the U.S. and Europe. In Regionalism and Rivalry, leading economists and political scientists address this concern by looking at three central questions: Is Japan forming a trading bloc in Pacific Asia? Does Japan use foreign direct investment in Southeast Asia to achieve national goals? Does Japan possess the leadership qualities necessary for a nation assuming greater political responsibility in international affairs?
The authors contend that although intraregional trade in East Asia is growing rapidly, a trade bloc is not necessarily forming. They show that the trade increase can be explained entirely by factors independent of discriminatory trading arrangements, such as the rapid growth of East Asian economies. Other chapters look in detail at cases of Japanese direct investment in Southeast Asia and find little evidence of attempts by Japan to use the power of its multinational corporations for political purposes. A third group of papers attempt to gauge Japan’s leadership characteristics. They focus on Japan’s “technology ideology,” its contributions to international public goods, international monetary cooperation, and economic liberalization in East Asia.
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FUNDAMENTALISMS AND SOCIETY
₨ 14,154This book, the second volume of the Fundamentalism Project, provides a systematic overview of the advances made by antisecular religious movements over the past twenty-five yeaand shows the impact these movements have had on human relations, education, women’s rights, and scientific research. The essays consider developments within the religious traditions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism in over a dozen nations. What do individual fundamentalist movements regard as the foundations for and limits of knowledge? What do they understand the proper role of science to be? And how do their world views determine the application of technology? The distinguished contributoto this volume – anthropologists, historians of religion, historians of science, and sociologists – address these and other questions through a discussion of topics such as educational structures of Hindu revivalism, women in fundamentalist Iran and Pakistan, and the creationist cosmos of Protestant fundamentalism. In a concluding essay, William H. McNeill situates contemporary fundamentalisms within a world historical context. The Fundamentalism Project is a monumental undertaking by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that involves an international group of scholars. Taken together, the volumes in this series will become a standard reference for educatoand policy analysts for yeato come.
