Varied Perceptions

The present volume is a collection of some papers presented at the Symposia of the Tenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at New Delhi in 1978. The papers in the book are organized to cover broad themes related to women with the title being reflective of the need to focus on these immediate concerns of women—‘visibility and power’. The objective of the present volume as reflected in the themes into which the articles are distri¬buted and the common thread evident throughout the contents has been to draw women to the centre of social reality, rather than ignoring the women’s perspec¬tive or relegating it to limited areas as has been the case hitherto in the majority of disciplines. The articles look into various aspects of women’s lives, to em¬phasize women’s perceptions and subjec¬tive experiences such that the women’s point of view may be adequately incorpo¬rated and converge with men’s perceptions in order to arrive at a holistic understand¬ing of social reality. This volume in fact emphasizes the need for every discipline to examine social reality and reinterpret it keeping in mind the hitherto ignored dimension of gender relations.