Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

In theory, the word ‘conservation’ brings to mind a science requiring careful knowledge of ecological principles for the preservation, protection and restoration of human-impacted landscapes. In practice, it has also become a contentious stage for debate, where politics – local, national and global – engages with policies, governments impact the lives of local communities, and development displaces conservation.

Drowned And Damned is a difficult book to review. Though empirically strong, analysed and discussed well, it is written rather densely.

An overwhelming impression, after being confronted with the experiences of fourteen analyst–practitioners in Shahabuddin and Rangarajan’s edited volume, is the strong legacy of 150 years of state run conservation policy in India.

This volume is an effort to focus attention of economists primarily and also policymakers and citizens on the impact of changing economic policies on natural resourccs ,

The volume under review is a collection of short pieces previously published by the author in a number of dailies and periodicals – many of which have been revised and expanded for inclusion in the book.

The book under review brings together the experiences of affirmative action from different parts of the world and offers rich insights from a comparative perspective.

Disappearing Daughters is a collection of stories about women’s views of life, about a campaign, about a society in which daughters are becoming rare.

A collection of eight essays written by the author at different points of time have been compiled together in this book. Bina Srinivasan, the author acknowledges that things have changed; she has moved on.

The book under review has a different sub-title on the inner cover (Ideology and Population Policy in India) was avoidable as the book’s focus is the state’s ideology of development, gender, underlying reproductive health policies and programme, and the discursive processes giving birth to these ideologies.

There has been a huge explosion of studies in medical anthropology – some good, some indifferent, and many appalling – in recent years.

Although it presents itself as a historical ethnography, this is as much a volume in the rather rare but always exciting genre of political ethnography. The essays explore – in a variety of country contexts, some historical, others contemporary – the meaning of the vote as a material technology as well as performance.