Shorelines

by Subramanian, Ajantha

• ISBN13: 9780804761468
• ISBN10: 0804761469
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-28
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church's intermediary role. InShorelines, Ajantha Subramanian argues that their struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, she illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, she shows how they produced new geographiesof regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenshipthat underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice. Moving beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations, this work reveals the charged political maneuvers that bound subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia. In rich historical and ethnographic detail,Shorelinesilluminates postcolonial rights politics as the product of particular histories of caste, religion, and development, allowing us to see how democracy is always "provincial."

Author Biography

Ajantha Subramanian is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Note on Terminology	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Genealogies of Inequality and Rights
The Coastal World: Spatial Jurisdictions and Meanings	p. 35
From the Inland Out: Case Purity to Caste Modernity	p. 66
Changing Developmentalisms: Spatializing the Artisan	p. 103
Postcolonial Challenges
Community Development to the Blue Revolution: New Technologies, New Shorelines	p. 143
Projects of Intermediacy: Regionalism, Artisanal Territory, Appropriate Technology	p. 171
Locality and Nation: Respatializing Rights Under Neoliberalism	p. 206
Conclusion	p. 245
Notes	p. 257
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 293
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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