This book is an anthropological study located along India’s western border with Pakistan. The core arguments are situated within the context of contemporary religious nationalism, communal strife, and border politics in the Indian state of Gujarat. It seeks to understand how, within these contexts, a region becomes a meaningful place for its inhabitants and how different peoples relate to locality through time. Theoretically, the book builds on available anthropological literatures on state formation and border politics to interrogate the presumed impermeability of nationalist discourse and territorial boundaries.

In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.

New perspectives on the historical, temporal and affective dimensions of borderlands and how they manifest in historical and contemporary experiences.

This volume approaches the study of Muslim societies through an evolutionary lens, challenging Islamic traditions, identities, communities, beliefs, practices and ideologies as static, frozen or unchangeable. It assumes that there is neither a monolithic, essential or authentic Islam, nor a homogeneous Muslim community. Similarly, there are no fixed binary oppositions such as between the ulama and sufi saints or textual and lived Islam. The overarching perspective — that there is no fixity in the meanings of Islamic symbols and that the language of Islam can be used by individuals, organizations, movements and political parties variously in religious and non-religious contexts — underlies the ethnographically rich essays that comprise this volume. Divided in three parts, the volume cumulatively presents an initial framework for the study of Muslim communities in India embedded in different regional and local contexts. The first part focuses on ethnographies of three Muslim communities (Kuchchhi Jatt, Irani Shia and Sidis) and their relationships with others, with shifting borders and frontiers; part two examines the issue of ‘caste’ of certain Muslim communities; and the third part, containing chapters on Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Mumbai and Gujarat, looks at the varied responses of Muslims as Indian citizens in regional contexts at different historical moments. Although the volume focuses on Muslim communities in India, it is also meant to bridge an important gap in, and contribute to, the ‘sociology of India’ which has been organized and taught primarily as a sociology of Hindu society. The book will appeal to those in sociology, history, political science, education, modern South Asian Studies, and to the general reader interested in India & South Asia.

This book is rooted in an epistemological approach to sociology in which the boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies are acknowledged and built on. It argues that knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces linked to paradigms and programmes which in turn are linked to ethnocentred knowledge processes; that until recently Western approaches, including Post-Colonial, French Social Science and American approaches, have dominated non-Western theories; and that Western theories have sometimes seemed incapable of explaining phenomena produced in other societies. It goes on to argue that the blurring of boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies is very important; and that such a Post-Western approach will mean co-production and co-construction of common knowledge, the recognition of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures and a "global change" in sociology which imposes theoretical and methodological detours, displacements, reversals and conversions. The book brings together a wide range of Western and Chinese sociologists who explore the consequences of this new approach in relation to many different issues and aspects of sociology.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the ends of empire in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, with chapters analysing the empires of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China and Japan. The Handbook combines broad, regional treatments of decolonization with chapter contributions constructed around particular themes or social issues. It considers how the history of decolonization is being rethought as a result of the rise of the 'new' imperial history, and its emphasis on race, gender, and culture, as well as the more recent growth of interest in histories of globalization, transnational history, and histories of migration and diaspora, humanitarianism and development, and human rights. The Handbook, in other words, seeks to identify the processes and commonalities of experience that make decolonization a unique historical phenomenon with a lasting resonance. In light of decades of historical and social scientific scholarship on modernization, dependency, neo-colonialism, 'failed state' architectures and post-colonial conflict, the obvious question that begs itself is 'when did empires actually end?' In seeking to unravel this most basic dilemma the Handbook explores the relationship between the study of decolonization and the study of globalization. It connects histories of the late-colonial and post-colonial worlds, and considers the legacies of empire in European and formerly colonised societies.

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging, and control are shown in sharp relief. Through ethnographic and historical analysis, Jason Cons argues that these spaces are key locations for rethinking the production of territory in South Asia today. Sensitive Space examines the ways that these areas mark a range of anxieties over territory, land, and national survival and lead us to consider why certain places emerge as contentious, and often violent, spaces at the margins of nation and state. Offering lessons for the study of enclaves, lines of control, restricted areas, gray spaces, and other geographic anomalies, Sensitive Space develops frameworks for understanding the persistent confusions of land, community, and belonging in border zones. It further provides ways to think past the categories of sovereignty and identity to reimagine territory in South Asia and beyond.