Kathinka Frøystad

Communal riots in India as a transitory form of political violence: three approaches

Abstract Despite their brutality, communal riots in India constitute a far more short-lived form of political violence than civil war and state terror. To make this point is not so commonsensical as it may seem, given the scarcity of reflections regarding this fact in the scholarship on riots in India. Therefore, in thematizing temporality, transience and recurrence, this article aims to broaden the study of communal riots and relate it more closely to general discussions of political violence. Beginning with the three most common approaches to communal riots in India within social anthropology and its neighbouring disciplines – namely the birds-eye view, agency and everyday life approaches – I suggest how each can be extended or employed to make riot temporality clearer. This focus may also nuance the way we conceptualize the role of the state and encourage reflection on how we classify instances of political violence.

Failing the third toilet test: Reflections on fieldwork, gender and Indian loos

This article reexamines the long-standing corridor topic of toilet facilities in anthropological fieldwork, arguing that their condition has stronger methodological implications than previously acknowledged. Drawing on personal experiences from three successive fieldworks in one of India’s poorest states – Uttar Pradesh – it reflects on the importance of gender, age, and prior experience with unfamiliar sanitary facilities in shaping our adjustment to the conditions we meet in the field. It narrates the three ‘toilet tests’ to which the author has been exposed over a series of field visits: the transition to water, squatting, and ultimately the lack of privacy. Failing the latter, she had to shelve a promising fieldwork lead. Scaling up, the article suggests that, if field sites with ‘difficult’ toilet conditions attract fewer and differently positioned anthropologists, the result is likely to be a bias in coverage and theory-building that merits more reflection.

Alter-Politics Reconsidered: From Different Worlds to Osmotic Worlding

Kathinka Froystad criticizes the tendency of anchoring the alter-political imagination of alternative futures in studies of radical alterity of the kind favored by a vocal section of the ontological turn. Such studies are certainly useful for reassessing the nature/culture distinction that perpetuates climate change. Yet their tendency to analyze cosmologies, religions, and “worlds” as distinct and contrasting carries an uncanny Abrahamic echo besides feeding into a lethal politics of difference. Drawing on ethnography from a multi-faith neighborhood in the North-Indian city of Kanpur, Froystad argues that, it is equally relevant to look for “osmotic worlding” as for “different worlds”. To develop an alter-political project of rethinking religious plurality, the first step must be to dismantle the very idea of radical alterity.