A graveyard, fresh dirt, bleak skies--these are the things that Alice is left to fill the void of the passing of her husband, John. Her memories alone of their love that started in a small village in Kerala, India, is not enough to comfort her in the darkness of a cemetery in the United States, so far away from home. Brought overseas by the nursing gap in the 1970s that so desperately left the United States in a health-care crisis, Alice is a displaced nurse who brought her family, including her brother, Jose, with her on this arduous journey. Although Alice's profession is essential to building the economy, she is not met with a welcome committee or happiness on arrival. She suffers through rejection, discrimination, and prejudice at the hands of the men and women who begged for her and others like her to be here. The passion of her brother, Jose, was for writing, and he yearned to go back to his home country with the money needed to kick-start his career. He soon discovers that the American dream is nothing but a mirage--he realizes that the invitation to this monumental country does not come with instructions on how to survive it. As America becomes more polarized, they are forced to lose their dignity, self-worth, culture, and honor to make it day by day in a country whose people see them as a threat. Through the struggle, Jose intensely questions humanity. Will he, his friends, and sister, Alice, succumb to the unintended role they play as Atlas in carrying the burdens of the exotics that are now trapped here?

Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a new comparative angle to understanding suicide beyond mainstream Western bio-medical and classical sociological conceptions of the act as an individual or social pathology is opened up. The book explores a number of ontological assumptions about the role of free will, power, good and evil, personhood, and intentionality in both popular and expert explanations of suicide. Suicide and Agency offers a substantial and ground-breaking contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of suicide. It will appeal to a range of scholars and students, including those in anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, suicidology, and social studies of death and dying.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation’s suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

Nancy’s Ayurvedic body massage salon in Copenhagen initially struggled to thrive. However, a fateful encounter with a customer named Paul Scott would forever change her life. Impressed by the exceptional quality of her massages, Paul became a loyal patron, recommending her salon to others. During their massage sessions, Nancy, grappling with her third divorce and other personal challenges, opened up to Paul about her tumultuous life journey. Amidst the soothing aromas and gentle strokes of Nancy’s sanctuary, a tale of resilience, hope, and the power of human connection unfolded, leaving them both forever transformed by the healing balm of friendship and the unyielding strength of the human spirit. ____________________________________________________ Her life experiences are much bigger and varied, associated with hardship, problems, risk taking, and adventures that he can’t exactly fathom out.

Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi was the first musician ever to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor. She is the first Indian musician to receive the Ramon Magsaysay award, often considered Asia’s Nobel Prize, in 1974 with the citation reading “Exacting purists acknowledge Srimati M. S. Subbulakshmi as the leading exponent of classical and semi-classical songs in the Karnataka tradition of South India.”

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women’s rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.

To the civilian, life in the services seems to be full of glamour and glitter … But what is it like in reality? Is it just the (perceived) comforts, privileges, household staff, dedicated healthcare services, parties, et al? What is it actually like for the people living this life, far removed from their native roots, especially for the wives, who have to adjust to a totally different life style, while maintaining the prestige of their husbands’ positions, and taking care of the families’ needs? This collection of real life stories is a narration by one such Navy wife, covering her transition from a sheltered young girl in the southern city of Thiruvananthapuram, to her life in the major metropolises, and even abroad, as the wife of a very senior officer. Written with sensitivity and gentle humour, the stories are a great read, throwing light on the private lives of these guardians of our frontiers, which all of us have been curious to know about …