James Staples

Becoming a man: personhood and masculinity in a South Indian leprosy colony

This article, which draws on fieldwork with a community of leprosy-affected people in south India, explores the contrasting ways in which ideas about social completeness might be invoked in different contexts. Following an overview of how notions of ‘personhood’ and ‘adulthood’ in India have thus far been theorised, I go on to examine how my informants managed to construct their identities as ‘children’ in relation to foreign donors, without simultaneously surrendering claims to adult status. Since relationships with various categories of outsiders were only one set of routes through which my informants constituted themselves, the second half of the article focuses on the generational demarcations between the leprosy-affected people who founded the community, and their healthy sons. Ethnographic examples illustrate how there are different ways of becoming a man and an adult, but also that these different ways draw on shared Indian idioms of what it is to be a complete person.

Delineating Disease: Self-Management of Leprosy Identities in South India

The national and international agencies working to eliminate leprosy are also dominant in setting the boundaries of official discourse on the issue. Within these boundaries the disease is commonly represented as a medical problem with negative social consequences, and it is believed that both problem and consequences will be resolved if leprosy is eliminated and its victims treated and (if necessary) reintegrated within their social groups. For those affected by leprosy the issues are frequently different, elimination in some respects representing a problem as much as a solution. Against this background, which I describe with reference to a group of leprosy-affected people in South India and their position vis-à-vis leprosy organizations, I explore some of the contexts in which leprosy patients actively manage their own situations, often in defiance of prevailing development orthodoxies. I conclude that closer observation and analysis of the strategies patients use to manage their disease status have important policy implications.

Situating Suicide as an Anthropological Problem: Ethnographic Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflicted Death

More than a century after Durkheim’s sociological classic placed the subject of suicide as a concern at the heart of social science, ethnographic, cross-cultural analyses of what lie behind people’s attempts to take their own lives remain few in number. But by highlighting how the ethnographic method privileges a certain view of suicidal behaviour, we can go beyond the limited sociological and psychological approaches that define the field of ‘suicidology’ in terms of social and psychological ‘pathology’ to engage with suicide from our informants’ own points of view—and in so doing cast the problem in a new light and new terms. In particular, suicide can be understood as a kind of sociality, as a special kind of social relationship, through which people create meaning in their own lives. In this introductory essay we offer an overview of the papers that make up this special issue and map out the theoretical opportunities and challenges they present.

The suicide niche: Accounting for self-harm in a South Indian leprosy colony

This article analyses the circumstances under which attempted suicide became an increasingly common possibility of thought and action among the young, healthy generation of people who had grown up in the South Indian leprosy community where I conducted long-term fieldwork, despite suicide remaining relatively uncommon amongst their leprosy-affected, and often physically disabled, parents and grandparents. Alert to the pitfalls of analytical approaches that either privilege over-arching structural explanations—like those favoured by Durkheim—or, conversely, give too much credence to individual agency and psychology, my analysis here attempts to chart a course through these polarities. It does so by drawing both on Ian Hacking’s ‘ecological niche’ metaphor—to explore how particular configurations of events and circumstances, at different times, might render suicide related behaviour more or less likely among different groups; and on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’—to consider how particular sets of bodily dispositions might generate certain styles of attempted suicide and self-harm.

‘Go on, just try some!’: Meat and Meaning-Making among South Indian Christians

This is an Authors Accepted Manuscript of an article published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31(1), 36-55, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00856400701874700.

Introduction: Suicide in South Asia: Ethnographic perspectives

This volume has its roots in a two-day international workshop, ‘Ethnographies of Suicide’, which was held at Brunel University in West London, UK, back in July 2008. The 15 papers presented there drew on fieldwork from across the world, with contributions from Afghanistan, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Greece, Portugal and the UK. It was noteworthy, however, that a third of the papers, as well as an additional film presentation, all focused on work that had been conducted in South Asia, particularly in India and Sri Lanka. Despite having recently begun fieldwork on suicide in the region myself—in Andhra Pradesh—until I organised the conference I had been unaware of the wider interest in the topic among fellow South Asianist scholars, and began to realise that there was a strong case for bringing more of this work together in a single collection. Rather than confining insights into suicide to references in isolated monographs and papers, presenting them as a collection allows regional connections and comparisons to be made that might otherwise go unobserved. Such a volume might also provoke further studies into a subject

Communities of the Afflicted: Constituting Leprosy through Place in South India

With the promotion of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) as a solution to health-related issues across the global South, leprosy colonies have long been out of vogue for nongovernmental organizations and State institutions alike. Such colonies, however, have endured. As is being increasingly recognized by those working in the leprosy field, such places have played a particular role not only in the provision of leprosy-related care but also in forging new and collective identities for people affected by leprosy that might otherwise not have been possible. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in one such colony in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, and explore the values invested in it as a particular kind of place; its geographical location on the peripheries; and its architecture and layout (inspired in part by colonial sanatoriums), which have particular implications for how leprosy and its ramifications are constituted and managed.

Consumer and Consumed

The papers that make up this collection were already long in development when the European ‘horsemeat scandal’ in early 2013 threatened to derail still further what fragile trust there remained in food producers and retailers. This scandal entailed the discovery that horsemeat was being passed off in branded ready-made meals and processed foods as other types of more culturally acceptable meat, beef in particular (Lawrence 2013). But earlier animal food-related crises – from the discovery of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in cattle in the 1980s, to the widespread contamination of powdered milk with melamine in China that came to light in 2008 – had already made it abundantly plain that, in the context of industrialising and globalising food supply systems, the animals we eat do not simply sustain our bodies or satisfy our culinary tastes but, in doing so, come profoundly to reshape social, economic and ecological relations and cultural understandings of edibility, taste and health. Connections between humans and animals-as-food are not simply one-way relationships between consumer and consumed, but involve a more complex set of relations concerned, among other things, with ecological change, world markets and local economic conditions, health and food safety, labour relations and changing cultural values. For example, growing meat consumption has been described as part of a wider, increasingly globalised ‘nutrition transition’ away from diets rich in fibres and complex carbohydrates, a transition associated with emergent health concerns including rises in obesity, type II diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular illnesses and certain cancers (Popkin 1993; Drewnowski 1999).

Civilizing Tastes: From Caste to Class in South Indian Foodways

Anthropologists have long recognized that rules and practices concerning food and caste in India are closely intertwined. The ritually highest ranking Hindu castes are characterized as protecting their purity by accepting cooked (or kacca) food from no one of lower caste status and those at the bottom as accepting food from anyone (see, e.g., Mayer 1960;Marriott 1968;Dumont 1970;Beteille 1996: 56–60;Deliege 1999). Caste identity is also reflected in what people eat: castes within the Brahmin and Vaisya varnas are usually vegetarian; castes from the other two varnas might eat meat; and Dalits, Muslims and Christians — located outside the classic four varna model altogether — might also eat beef (Deliege 1999: 38; Staples 2008). Variations in preparation and tastes are also frequently attributed to caste as well as to strong regional affiliations. For example, some Brahmins, older women in particular, avoid garlic, onions and other ‘heating’ ingredients deemed inappropriate for their bodily substance (Lamb 2000: 193; Daniel 1987), while others claim to adopt a more complex or refined meal structure than their regional peers from other castes.

Disability Studies: Developments in Anthropology

Despite the proliferation of disability studies (DS) in the USA and Britain over the last three decades, anthropology—for a discipline committed to understanding alterity, has contributed surprisingly little to the study of disability. There have been relatively few ethnographic studies that engage directly with disability; fewer still explicitly engage with the broader interdisciplinary arena of DS to document and analyse the experience of disability in the global South. Until recently, this has meant that DS has been dominated by the concerns of disabled people, policymakers and service providers in western, industrialised countries, rather than expanding to explore the different ways in which disability might be configured cross-culturally (e.g. see Miles 2002; Mehrotra 2011; Grech 2011, 2012). Ingstad and Whyte noted this gap in their pioneering edited collection Disability and Culture (1995) 20 years ago; Kasnitz and Shuttleworth made the same point a few years later (2001a, b); and, according to Rapp and Ginsburg (2012; Ginsburg and Rapp 2013), the lacuna still remains. Why that should be so is a matter of speculation. Rapp and Ginsburg, based on their own experiences in the USA, ultimately favour a Freudian explanation: that anthropologists, fearful of the loss that disability ultimately brings to us all, in one form or another, are in denial (2012: 174). Linton (1998) suggests that the lack of interest shown by anthropologists in disability corresponds with the fact that there are so few disabled anthropologists, and that those who do make it within the academy become marginalised. ‘Indiana Jones in a wheelchair’, to borrow Kasnitz and Shuttleworth’s (2001a) image, is not a picture easily conjured up, other than as parody. By the same token, we would also suggest (based on anecdotal evidence from conversations with colleagues over the years) that some anthropologists might implicitly consider ‘the disabled’ as inherently less interesting—because they are assumed to be intrinsically unable to engage fully in social life—as creators and consumers of culture than more mainstream representatives of the populations being studied. Despite Mead’s injunction back in the 1950s for us to study human beings in all their diversity, this is an understanding of disabled people that persists (Mead 1953).