Architexturez South Asia
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Sindh in Karachi: A topography of separateness, connectivity, and juxtaposition
No full textFrom imperial ‘unhappy valley’, to decapitated province, commercial capital, and 21st century megacity, this article reflects on relations of separateness and connectivity between Sindh and its capital city Karachi. These culminated in Pakistan’s post-Independence years, in official and political language, governances of national, provincial and city division, and political rhetoric and violence. The article asks what else might be uncovered about their relationship other than customary alignments and partitions between an alien urban behemoth and a provincial periphery. It develops a topographical view to refer to the physical arrangement of environments but also people’s profane, spiritual and political connections and losses involving place and dwelling. This is expanded through examples of land appropriations involving urban real-estate development, environmental migrations and displacement, the idiom of the hijra and Sufistic devotion, and ethnic nationalist and religious extremism. The article questions ways losses of ground and attachment might unite people across provincial divides in an alternative, forward motion of cohabitation. It reveals a multi-layered historical tracing of ways that Sindh, as it is lived in Karachi and vice versa, digresses and wanders through deep cross-regional dynamics and developments. These create new departures from self and place, and rebuff the tendency to centre ‘other’ knowledges as the starting-point and epistemology for studies of Karachi and Sindh. Last, Karachi is a useful optic for thinking about continuities of colonialism and postcolonialism, crisis and fracture in South Asia; ways these are infused with planetary urbanization dynamics, and local, regional and national developments that resist easy universalism.</p
Governance of resettlement compensation and the cultural fix in rural China
No full textFinancial management of resettlement funding has always been problematic for governments and development agencies trying to mitigate the negative effects of moving people from one location to another. In China, Poverty Alleviation Resettlement attempts to rectify the shortcomings in policies designed for distributing compensation and ensuring funds reach their intended use with apparatuses of security. Governance technologies take the form of reimbursement subsidies, which mitigate the risk that funds will be corrupted or households misuse money, by reimbursing expenditures already made on village construction. These technologies convey the contradictory nature of Chinese rural development, as they employ neoliberal discourse to direct fiscal transfers from the central government to enterprising individuals, but also attempt poverty alleviation of rural societies’ most marginalized households. Resettlement technologies are therefore leading to uneven development while simultaneously claiming to adhere to transnational poverty alleviation norms. In this article, the Party-state applies a cultural fix to resolve contradictions in the development apparatus. The Party-state draws on historical governance norms to change the meaning of the corrupt official that receives disproportionate government assistance into the “ideal” all villages should emulate. In this way, the Chinese bureaucracy appropriates the power of local elites to guide conduct and achieve broader political economic goals.</p
The street as workspace: Assessing street vendors’ rights to trees in Hyderabad, India
No full textUrban street trees provide critical ecosystem services such as shade and contribute to the health and well-being of urban residents - especially those who spend much of the day outdoors. Our paper focusses on one of the most vulnerable groups in a city: street vendors, who spend much of their time on streets, with or without trees. Most contemporary visions for green cities ignore street vendors and fail to consider their uses and expectations of public green spaces. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 75 street vendors in 11 market streets in the hot Indian city of Hyderabad, we discuss their perceptions of the importance of trees for their daily work and livelihood and describe the challenges that street vendors face in accessing shade in a hot city. In several instances, “development” of urban areas has led to gentrification, with the felling of trees and displacement of street vendors, bringing into question their ‘right to the city’. We argue that street vendors are largely left out of considerations of urban ecological planning, despite being one of the groups most affected by the availability of wooded streets in cities. Ecologists, urban researchers, planners and landscape designers must explicitly consider greening strategies from the perspective of street vendors for inclusive, sustainable urban development.
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The mohol: The hidden power structure of Bangladesh local politics
No full textIt is a common view that power in Bangladesh is exercised through patron–client forms of exchange. These patron–client relationships are held together by moral proximity and intimacy and are diffused and multidimensional. Most recently, Basu et al. (2018, Politics and Governance in Bangladesh: Uncertain Landscapes, 1–16. London: Routledge) argue for the persuasive presence of patron–client relationships and its role as the informal, ‘real’ structure as opposed to the formal state structure. The portrait, however, leaves us with the image of a vast undifferentiated web where the only node is the one at the centre. This article seeks to temper this portrait by arguing that at a certain point the web is no longer undifferentiated. It has locally real, tangible nodes of substantial power—often referred to as mohol (quarter) in Bangla. These nodes of power are often albeit not invariably centred on the local MP. The existence of these nodes indicates a decentralised power structure, wherein power is located in numerable nodes across the country rather than centralised in Dhaka.</p
Land, development and the political class: In a translocal ‘Londoni’ village
No full textThis article expands Akhil Gupta’s (1995, American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375–402) thesis of ‘blurred boundaries’ between ‘the state’ and ‘society’ in South Asia to incorporate the impact of historic labour migrations, which complicate established conceptions of the state in Bangladesh. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an area of high migration to the UK, the article draws attention to a class of transnational politicians, and their intra-class conflicts of interest, in shaping local-level politics. The article supports Faguet’s (2017, Modern Asian Studies 51(6), 1668–94) contention that the decentralisation of local government has led to the emergence of vernacularised political economies that operate in the shadow of the state, which are also intrinsically facilitated by it. It suggests that state actors appropriate symbols, offices and resources, together with traditional authority and kinship dynamics, to create an idiosyncratic polity. Aspiration towards power that might lead to the occupation of state offices are determined by either the aspirant’s status as a British citizen (Londoni) or through intimate social and economic connections to Britain through kinship (gushti) networks. The article thus makes a broader contribution to the existing literature on the anthropology of the state, transnational politics and the nexus of power, money and migration in postcolonial contexts.</p
Rural-urban studies: A macro analyses of the scholarship terrain
No full textThe interconnections between rural and urban areas have been a major topic of discussion among scholars and policy makers for decades. While both rural and urban areas depend on each other for critical services, rural areas, especially in the developing countries, are often under-represented in policy and essential service provisions. Though widely studied from different perspectives across the globe, the academic landscape of rural-urban nexus is poorly characterized. This study aims to characterize the field, employing bibliometric analysis. Bibliometric is applied because it allows obtaining useful quantitative overview of the evolution of an academic field. The study aims to address six important questions: (1) how has scholarship evolved over the past three decades in this subfield of rural-urban studies? (2) which countries are at the forefront of knowledge production in the subfield? (3) what are the leading productive institutions in the world? (4) where are scholars publishing their works? (5) who are the leading authors in the field? and (6) are there any major areas where scholars have been focusing on over the last three decades? Results show that rural-urban scholarship has grown exponentially over the studied period (1990–2018). The United States has been a major single player in publication records, productive authors, international collaboration and institutional contribution. Further, research in the domain of rural-urban nexus can be categorized into six major clusters; (1) socioeconomic inequalities, (2) livelihood, (3) migration, (4) consumption and poverty, (5) biodiversity and conservation, and (6) connectivity and integration. Given the dearth of contribution in the developing world, the study argued that the subfield of rural-urban scholarship is largely under the hegemony of global north scholars. Potential research areas and study weaknesses are discussed
Bantwal Goat Shed
No full textThe project is a farm facility in Bantwal, Dakshina Kannada to house goats, store coconuts and provide onsite accommodation for the farm watchman. The 23 acre farm currently consists of 1000 coconut and areca nut trees and 12 goats. The new building emerges from the availability of a variety of terracotta products: barbeque bricks (commonly used for drying coffee beans) and hollow bricks are laid using a brick dust mortar; a chimney is constructed to heat water in traditional copper pots and to provide a wood-fired oven for cooking; and found terracotta objects appear periodically within the structure.
Monsoon construction made it necessarily to erect a temporary structure from arecanut trunks to support a lightweight tarpaulin canopy. This fragile construction enables work to continue during the rains. Spontaneous, flexible and tactile, this temporary structure has been a key impetus to the process of creating the building itself.</p
Witnessing a Disaster: Public Use of Digital Technologies in the 2015 South Indian Floods
No full textMobile phones and social media can be potent tools for members of the public to circulate news and information during natural disasters. Using in-depth interviews, this study examines the case of a citizen collective to understand the interconnections between citizen journalism, mobile devices, and social media in disaster response, particularly in the Global South. Specifically, we investigate how mobile devices helped a prominent citizen collective to witness the 2015 South Indian floods and to share crucial news and information on social media. Our findings reveal that while mobile phones and social media enabled citizen journalists to gather, verify, and relay news during the floods, these technologies were unable to sufficiently challenge caste, class, and urban-rural inequalities in disaster response. We also demonstrate that the concept of witnessing developed by Peters provides a useful framework to study the production of journalism by citizen collectives in extraordinary times.</p
Archaeological (Non?) Alignments: Egypt, India, and Global Geographies of the Post-War Past
No full textThis article demonstrates how the politics of non-alignment and multilateralism intersected with the making of scientific knowledge about the past after the Second World War. The article shows how post-war political (re-) arrangements helped to realign not only the geographies of that knowledge, but also the people who could claim expertise in making it. The article concentrates on events during UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which took place during the 1960s and 1970s in Egypt and Sudan in response to the flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Discussing the Egyptian excavations carried out during the work by the Archaeological Survey of India, the article shows how the campaign offered the chance to realign – if not entirely non-align – the ways in which knowledge of the past was made, circulated, and justified. Carrying out archaeological work in another non-aligned nation-state not only represented a favourable international intervention for India, but also allowed the country to rearrange colonial logics of archaeological knowledge production to its advantage and to claim expertise in their use. The Archaeological Survey of India then attempted to perform this expertise elsewhere and thereby bolster the post-partition narrative of a ‘greater India’.</p
Assembling Amaravati: speculative accumulation in a new Indian city
No full textThe paper explores processes of speculative accumulation through land in the making of a new city in Andhra Pradesh, southern India. Rather than analysing the Amaravati plan as an example of neoliberal urbanization or ‘accumulation by dispossession’, it examines how the project is unfolding on the ground by situating it within the region’s ‘vernacular capitalism’ centred on land and finance capital. The paper maps the processes of speculative accumulation through which value is extracted from land by diverse actors, and describes the practices of calculation, investment and negotiation employed by local landowners to manage their uncertain futures and to insert themselves as ‘stakeholders’ in the development of the new city. The Amaravati case reflects the deepening entanglement of transnational and provincial circuits of capital in post-liberalization India.</p