Carol Appadurai Breckenridge

The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism

No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who half-imagine ourselves as minds in a material context, who have learned to resent the publicness of raceor sexor otherwise-marked bodies and to think theories of embodiment as theories about the subjectivity of able-bodied comportment and practice under conditions of systematic injustice. From this perspective, disability studies may be twice marginalized—first, by able-bodied anxiety; second, by a tendency to treat disability as just another hindrance to social mobility, perhaps one best left to medical discourse or descriptive sociology. New work in disability studies, however, challenges established habits of thought about “having” a body. Disability studies dissolves deeply entrenched mind-andbody distinctions and further destabilizes the concept of the normal, whose charted internal ambiguities have themselves become too familiar. An ethics and a politics of disability are crucial to the work of the university—pedagogically, theoretically,

From Protector to Litigant— Changing Relations Between Hindu Temples and the Raja of Ramnad

(in present-day Tamilndtu).’ Throughout the nineteenth century, the royal family of this proud and elegant people was referred to as litigious, bankrupt, and decadent. The royal court became known for its orgiastic nautch parties at which cock-fighting and other indulgences were thought to have squandered away the energy and resources of the people. According to the prescriptions of Manu as understood and interpreted by or for British officials, Maravars were ranked low for they were eaters of animal-flesh. Similarly, their marriage alliance patterns, eating-habits and &dquo;martial&dquo; disposition did not correspond with the rules and practices of &dquo;clean&dquo; castes as understood by the institutions and officials of Government.