Pinky Hota

Based on fieldwork conducted in Kandhamal, Odisha, this article demonstrates how scripts about money, value, and indigeneity are used as exclusionary discourses by development state officials and caste Hindus to portray Indian tribals as failed citizens of the Indian development state. These discourses are used not only as a means of disciplining tribals as indigenous citizens, but also to elide other contradictions within the development state such as corruption, thereby sustaining 'modern development' as a project of perpetual deferral. However, this article also shows how Kandha tribals, in turn, appropriate these scripts to display their understanding of the shifting contours of indigenous citizenship and its mandates for entitlements from the development state and indigenous political agency. In so doing, this article demonstrates how historical discourses of money and indigeneity inform contemporary indigenous claims to citizenship. By attending to these discourses, it argues for indigeneity as a site to observe the folding-back of state power onto itself, as indigenous citizenship reanimates historical constructions of the adivasi as indigene but subverts these constructions by using a language of indigenous entitlement.

This Social Thought and Commentary essay examines three sex panics in Hindu right-wing India. These panics illustrate how sex is deployed as socially constructed and naturally arousing to deny the material body while engaging its fleshy materiality in mediational populist politics. Sex as an unstable system of signification and its material truth effects are co-con-stitutive in propagating right-wing violence that resists being read as either caste or sexual atrocity and is symptomatic of an ongoing ambivalence towards the market.

This essay sets up a dialogue between political anthropology and cultural psychology to examine how they expose the slippages between public reason and embodied morality within multiculturalism. By examining the work of Richard Shweder and Elizabeth Povinelli on radical alterity, morality and bodily practices, the essay details how cultural psychology and anthropology identify similar impulses and impasses within multiculturalism. Moreover, it advances a critical reading of cultural psychology's larger framing of debates about multiculturalism around the question of tolerance.

This Social Thought and Commentary essay examines three sex panics in Hindu right-wing India. These panics illustrate how sex is deployed as socially constructed and naturally arousing to deny the material body while engaging its fleshy materiality in mediational populist politics. Sex as an unstable system of signification and its material truth effects are co-con-stitutive in propagating right-wing violence that resists being read as either caste or sexual atrocity and is symptomatic of an ongoing ambivalence towards the market.

Based on fieldwork conducted in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2007–08, this article demonstrates how scripts about money, value, and indigeneity are used as exclusionary discourses by development state officials and caste Hindus to portray Indian tribals as failed citizens of the Indian development state. These discourses are used not only as a means of disciplining tribals as indigenous citizens, but also to elide other contradictions within the development state such as corruption, thereby sustaining ‘modern development’ as a project of perpetual deferral. However, this article also shows how Kandha tribals, in turn, appropriate these scripts to display their understanding of the shifting contours of indigenous citizenship and its mandates for entitlements from the development state and indigenous political agency. In so doing, this article demonstrates how historical discourses of money and indigeneity inform contemporary indigenous claims to citizenship. By attending to these discourses,...