Ester Gallo
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199469307
- eISBN:
- 9780199089871
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199469307.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Marriage and the Family
The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali ...
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The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali middle classes in Kerala and in the diaspora, the analysis focuses on how specific historical events are retrieved in the present to shape kinship relations and to legitimize trajectories of class mobility. The book bridges historical analysis of gendered family relations as they developed in colonial and postcolonial times with an anthropological inquiry of the symbolic and material premises of kinship among contemporary middle classes. It provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how middle-class status in contemporary south India is expressed by recalling family histories, and how remembrance shapes kinship ideals, norms, and experiences in domains as different as houses, conjugality, parenthood, reproduction and family size, intergenerational love and genealogical transmission. The book offers original insights on the continuities and differences between colonial and contemporary middle classes, and the role played by migration and diaspora in both contexts. It originally contributes to two interrelated and undertheorized fields within social sciences. Firstly, it addresses the need to develop further our understanding of how gendered kinship and family relations result from and express class belonging. Secondly, it unravels the complex and ambivalent relation between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of family relations.Less
The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali middle classes in Kerala and in the diaspora, the analysis focuses on how specific historical events are retrieved in the present to shape kinship relations and to legitimize trajectories of class mobility. The book bridges historical analysis of gendered family relations as they developed in colonial and postcolonial times with an anthropological inquiry of the symbolic and material premises of kinship among contemporary middle classes. It provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how middle-class status in contemporary south India is expressed by recalling family histories, and how remembrance shapes kinship ideals, norms, and experiences in domains as different as houses, conjugality, parenthood, reproduction and family size, intergenerational love and genealogical transmission. The book offers original insights on the continuities and differences between colonial and contemporary middle classes, and the role played by migration and diaspora in both contexts. It originally contributes to two interrelated and undertheorized fields within social sciences. Firstly, it addresses the need to develop further our understanding of how gendered kinship and family relations result from and express class belonging. Secondly, it unravels the complex and ambivalent relation between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of family relations.
Accounting for Oneself
Adjusting to a World in Motion
Advancing the Human Right to Health
Aid and Development
The AIDS Generation
Aliens and Strangers?
The Alternatives to War
Altruism in Humans
American Arcadia
