Means of Awakening:
Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India
Sirpa Tenhunen
demy octavo pb 250pp
ISBN 81-85604-97-5 Rs 345 Nov 2008
Providing an ethnographically rich study of local politics
and gender in rural India, this book is based on the author’s extensive
fieldwork in Janata, a village near Vishnupur in Bankura, West Bengal. She
documents how women are emerging in the forefront of political struggles. The
book explores both women’s political participation and agency, including
marriage, dowry and women’s role in the panchayats. She notes how building of
mobile networks has led to the intensification of rural networks. Tenhunen
argues that the gendered understanding of politics not only limits women’s
political participation, but also enables and shapes women’s political action
and critical discourses because the local concept of politics does not exclude
home kinship and the women’s domain.
Sirpa Tenhunen is an Academy Research Fellow at the Academy
of Finland and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University
of Helsinki. She has co-edited with Lina
Fruzzetti, Culture, Power and Agency:
Gender in Indian Ethnography (Stree, 2006).
Published By:Stree
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