Assa Doron

Mobile Persons: Cell phones, Gender and the Self in North India

In this article I analyse the varied ways mobile phones are integrated into the daily lives of low-income people and the implications for courtship practices, marriage relations and kinship ties. Rather than offer a celebratory analysis of the mobile phones empowering effects, my ethnographic research reveals a more complex story, one that shows how the presence of the mobile both reinforces and undermines gender roles and institutions of authority. Conceptually, I argue that mobile communication provides insights into north Indian personhood as ‘nodal’, while also stimulating new practices and ideologies that render this technology central to the struggle for (and over) power and domination.

The rise of cancer in urban India: Cultural understandings, structural inequalities and the emergence of the clinic

Cancer services in India have evolved and expanded significantly in recent years, with a surge in the availability of biomedical oncological treatment facilities for certain cohorts of the Indian population in urban areas. Despite significant and sustained economic development in many areas of India, major issues persist in the delivery of cancer care, even in the context of relatively prosperous urban populations. This article explores the dilemmas evident in Indian cancer care as perceived by a group of Indian oncology clinicians. Specifically, the interviews focused on their perspectives on the key challenges facing cancer patients, particularly in relation to help-seeking and access to care. The main concerns that emerged in the interviews were: (a) practical constraint (i.e. access and treatment); (b) cultural values (i.e. communication, stigma and the clinic); and (c) structural conditions (i.e. inequalities related to place, gender and class). We unpack these as important elements of cancer care in contemporary India, and present Farmer’s notion of structural violence, among other concepts, as potentially useful for understanding some facets of this social problem. We conclude that without a greater understanding of social and cultural issues shaping cancer care in India, little progress will be made in coping with a disease that is set to become a major burden within an increasingly prosperous and ageing population.

Traditional Medicines, Collective Negotiation, and Representations of Risk in Indian Cancer Care

Cancer is emerging as a key disease in India, but there has been virtually no research exploring understandings of cancer and practices of communication within oncology settings. This is despite the fact that the Indian context presents clinicians, patients, and family members with a range of unique challenges, including those related to disease awareness, interpersonal dynamics, and the use of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicines (TCAM). Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews with 22 Delhi-based oncology clinicians, in this article we examine clinicians’ accounts of communication with their cancer patients. The interviews reveal the challenges of communication given cancer’s relative novelty, cultural practices around collective negotiation, and rhetorical practices evident in advice-giving regarding TCAM. We conclude that with cancer set to become a major burden in India, research exploring competing forms of expertise, the politics of representation, and the nexus between traditional beliefs and techno-scientific development is urgently needed.

Mobile-izing: Democracy, organization and India's first "mass mobile phone" elections

We argue that the 2007 state elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Indias largest state, were the first “mass mobile phone” elections in India. The paper charts the spectacular growth of the cheap cell phone in India and in Uttar Pradesh, documents the organizational strengths of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and explains how a party once based on Dalit (ex-Untouchable, or Scheduled Caste) support was able to cooperate with Brahmins. In these processes the mobile phone acted as a remarkable “force multiplier” to the existing BSP organization and helped party workers to circumvent the general hostility of mainstream media. The paper does not contend that the mobile phone won the 2007 elections; rather, it argues that the BSP was able to exploit a potent new tool, ideally suited to poor people who often were limited in their ability to travel. The paper points to similarities with the Obama campaigns of 2008 and notes that though other political groups in India attempt to imitate the methods, they may lack the essential organization and dedicated workers.

The cultural politics of shit: class, gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in Indias countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.

Celling India: Exploring a society's embrace of the mobile phone

The mobile phone has been one of the most disruptive factors to come to India in modern times. This article aims to chalk out a framework for understanding the cell phones all-encompassing social impact. The extent of the change is huge. In 1987, India had 2.3 million phone connections (0.3% of its population). By January 2010, that number had gone up to 688 million phone connections (about 60% of the population if phones had been evenly distributed). More than 90% of the phones by 2010 were mobile phones. Charting the vast universe of Indias mobile telephony, this article identifies three categories of people: controllers, servants and users – those who control radio frequency spectrum; those who perform the host of tasks required to package and sell the spectrum; and those Indians, now numbering hundreds of millions, who use mobile phones every day. The theme is the profound transformation that mobile phones bring to individual lives, perhaps more fundamental in India than in other parts of the world. The mobile phone can be an equalizer: it has the potential to open to low-status people possibilities that they have never had before. The mushroom growth of the cell phone raises questions about effects on society, politics and economy. At the top of Indias class pyramid, how does one understand the great political–economic contests generated by struggles to control the cell phone market? At the base of the pyramid, to what extent does the mass availability of cheap cell phones and services alter the lives of poor, low-status people? And what of those in between? Is the cell phone destined to change human activity as profoundly as the printing press? This exploratory article begins to identify key questions related to mobile phones and sketches how a holistic account of the device and its implications might be composed.

Caste Away? Subaltern Engagement with the Modern Indian State

Mayawatis recent victory, in May 2007, in the Uttar Pradesh elections has been hailed as a ‘spectacular display of subaltern power’. The questions remain: who are these subalterns? To what extent do they form a coherent block, with similar fears, hopes and aspirations, and how are subalterns’ visions of the state, social justice and equality articulated? This paper explores some of these questions, by examining the example of the boatman community in Banaras, belonging to the Mallah (Nishad) caste, and the strategies they use to be heard as legitimate citizens of the state. Such strategies and techniques reveal a sophisticated and organized apparatus of caste and community associations that call into question some recent theoretical formulations of the Indian state as one dominated and manipulated by powerful elites, while subalterns remain passive or, at best, compliant.

Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India

ABSTRACT Successive Indian governments have attempted to tackle the formidable task of creating a clean India, with varied results. With the countrys rapidly growing middle class eager to participate in a sanitised global consumer capitalism, many Indians are becoming frustrated with the ‘unruly’ nature of their urban landscape, its dirty streets and public spaces. This is particularly discernible amongst Indias middle-class youth, who seem impatient with the states apparent inability to manage waste and disorder, and it is clear that several civil society campaigns designed to promote a clean India explicitly target Indian youth. In this paper, I explore what the ideological premise of cleansing initiatives reveals about the aspirations, needs and anxieties of Indias youth. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

Gender and masculinities: New perspectives

The tragic incident of a young woman gang-raped and beaten on a Delhi bus has sent shockwaves throughout India, making headlines internationally. For now, it seems, politicians are taking note of the unprecedented public outrage, protests and candlelight vigils in memory of the victim: even if many of them revealed their own patriarchal and ingrained biases while doing so. Whether this will translate into better policy and implementation of laws regarding protection of women is an open question. The sheer brutality and the brazenness of the Delhi case has challenged the core of Indian social values and moralities and has become a symbolic lightning-rod for focusing the spotlight on deeper issues that women’s-rights groups have been documenting and questioning for years. This is not an isolated incident: reports about violence and harassment against women in public spaces have long been common. Just a few months before the Delhi rape, for example, the sheer regularity of such incidents provoked the British newspaper, The Guardian, to ask ‘Why is India so Bad for Women?’1 This article in the Guardian posited, in a somewhat polemical fashion, that India’s gender relations continue to be heavily defined by forms of violence, humiliation and degradation against women.2 It was prompted by another misogynistic act of violence against a young female Assamese student. The student was sexually assaulted by a group of young men outside a bar in the state’s capital, Guwahati. The assault was filmed by a local TV crew, who did nothing to intervene, and subsequently made the headlines after the assault was broadcast across India’s numerous 24 hour television channels. Of considerable concern to human rights advocates and many facets of the Indian public was that the female victim was initially blamed by the media and local authorities for being a ‘loose drunk’ in a public place. That is, she was said to have invited such violence and humiliation upon herself by failing to accord with the ‘modesty prescribed for women’ under India’s unwritten but omnipresent patriarchal constitution.3 Such forms of sexual violence against women are not uncommon internationally. Yet, such explicit (and paradoxical) moral policing and the production of gender-based violence as media spectacle made this a particularly stunning and provocative case. While the last few decades have seen various social movements seeking to promote and improve gender relations in South Asia, particularly targeting violence, it is clear that such

Consumption, technology and adaptation: Care and repair economies of mobile phones in North India

On the edges of the digital world in India, there are millions of mobile phone users. To cater for these consumers, an economy of mobile phone care and repair has emerged in almost every town. Through the experiences of consumers and repairers, this article explores technology distribution, service practices and economic opportunity. How do they learn their trade? How do they make a living? And how do they position themselves in relation to the official branded manufacturers and licensed agents? Conceptually, the article is concerned with the nexus between consumer culture, the Indian middle class and the poor and how they engage global capitalism. It argues that middle-class ideologies and practices of consumption are both exclusive and expansive. At the same time, the poor seek to engage this economy by tapping into the unauthorized sector that responds to their demands for local participation in the global economy, while keeping them also at a certain distance from the forms and symbolic capital of the new economy.