The study of the relationship between nature and culture has been given new impetus over recent decades and has opened up attractive theoretical avenues. A number of social anthropologists have published inspiring books on this theme. The excessive duality between these two domains that some researchers refer to when contemplating non-western societies has been rightly questioned.
The title of this volume on media studies, edited by Ravi Sundaram, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is a suitable one. There really are no limits to the mediatized society that each one of us is embedded, if not buried, in. At the same time, there are very severe limits to our understanding of it.
This book is a story of a young girl who is shot by a Taliban bullet, survives miraculously and lives to tell her tale. Malala Yousafzai is celebrated and recognized as a fearless symbol of education across the globe. Malala is an educational campaigner from the Swat valley, Pakistan. She came to public attention by writing for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban.
In her book under review anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa provides a generalized model of the ‘Devi and the Dasi’ to understand what it means to be a woman in South Asia. For a book that has South Asia in its title, the focus is very narrowly on India. She justifies this by saying, in a footnote…
Safar was about the inner journey of the heart and mind that revealed the truth of one to oneself, and took one closer to that state known variously as enlightenment, self-realization, self-knowledge, satori, fana- …My safar to places of my past led me to intimacy with myself. Revealed who I am to me.
The topic of NGOs, especially those which are rights-based, in Pakistan is an intriguing and polarizing case in media discussions, always instigating hype by the critics over alleged negative roles and pushing the western agenda or by the proponents who appreciate NGOs’ capacity to challenge the authoritarian status quo.