Outgrowth of an international workshop on the subject of South Asian ethical practices held in Vancouver, Canada in September 2007.

Today, more than ever, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. As the line drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims becomes more rigid, Jalal seeks to retrieve the ethical meanings of this core Islamic principle in South Asian history. Drawing on historical, legal, and literary sources, Jalal traces the intellectual itinerary of jihad through several centuries and across the territory connecting the Middle East with South Asia.

A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies. Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

This volume provides original, nuanced insights into social meanings of money and wealth in moral economies of Asia. Through case studies from South and Southeast Asia, the collection sheds important light on how the new mobilities and wealth created by neoliberal globalization transform people's ways of life, notions of personhood, and their meaning making of the world. It highlights the moral dilemmas and anxieties emerging from the profound socio-economic transformations that are taking place across the region and deepens our understanding of local cultures as well as the inner contradictions of global capital in Asian contexts. With rich ethnographic insights and a diverse range of empirical contexts, chapters in this volume reveal multifaceted complexities and contradictions in the relationship between money and moralities. Money, they affirm, is not an impersonal, objective economic instrument with homogenizing powers but a culturally constructed and socially mediated currency in which meanings are constantly contested and re-negotiated across time and space.

"The essays in this volume explore adab, the Muslim ideal of the harmonious life of a person who knows the proper relationship to God, to others, and to oneself, and who, as a result, plays a special role among his or her fellows."--Jacket.

Illuminates the centrality of courtliness in the political and cultural life of the Deccan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In Stereotype confronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty focuses on the seductive force and explanatory power of stereotypes in multiple South Asian contexts, whether depicting hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, or outsourcing. She argues that such commonplaces are crucial to defining cultural identity in contemporary literature and shows how the stereotype's ambivalent nature exposes the crises of liberal development in South Asia. In Stereotype considers the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to illustrate how stereotypes about South Asia provide insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts: the colonial novel, the transnational film, and the international best-seller. Probing circumstances that range from the independence of the Indian subcontinent to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, Chakravorty builds an interpretive lens for reading literary representations of cultural and global difference. In the process, she also reevaluates the fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences by staging intersubjective encounters between cultures through stereotypes.