Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.

Social conditions in Ranawaton-ki-Sadri, village in Rajasthan; a study.

First Published in 1999. This volume is a product of the research programme of the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, entitled International Social Organization in East and Southeast Asia: Qiaoxiang Ties during the Twentieth Century. The programme will run from 1996-2000 (for a fuller description, please see the Appendix chapter). The book was prepared during a workshop at the International Convention of Asian Scholars, 25-8 June 1997, Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

Shares the consequences of parents' inability to love their offspring in a story of neglect, avoidance, and banishment spanning three generations

The region that is today the Republic of Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state agents. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by bitter conflict that was qualitatively different from previous outbreaks of violence. In Blood Ties, İpek K. Yosmaoğlu explains the origins of this shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence through a social history of the "Macedonian Question." Yosmaoğlu’s account begins in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin (1878), when a potent combination of zero-sum imperialism, nascent nationalism, and modernizing states set in motion the events that directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I and had consequences that reverberate to this day. Focusing on the experience of the inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia during this period, Yosmaoğlu shows how communal solidarities broke down, time and space were rationalized, and the immutable form of the nation and national identity replaced polyglot, fluid associations that had formerly defined people’s sense of collective belonging. The region was remapped; populations were counted and relocated. An escalation in symbolic and physical violence followed, and it was through this process that nationalism became an ideology of mass mobilization among the common folk. Yosmaoğlu argues that national differentiation was a consequence, and not the cause, of violent conflict in Ottoman Macedonia.