This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co‐ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self‐centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.
This paper explores juridical and political practices and conceptions of justice and authority in Rajasthan, India, outlining a discursive approach to legal pluralism. The presentation and the analysis of the narrative of a Rajasthani woman will be the focus of the present work. By providing her 'internal' perspective on a case study concerning a village dispute the aim of the paper is both to clarify how legal pluralism can be seen to work in a region of rural Rajasthan, and to prove the usefulness of the method here adopted for the identification and comprehension of the modalities through which different levels of organization are produced and structured within discourse. Indeed, the attempt is to show how legal pluralism can be analyzed not only according to the postulated presence of different normative systems or access to diverse legal forums, but also in relation to the capacity of social actors to build, in a (semi)autonomous way, their position within a discursive order characterized by the potential production and multiplication of legal and political planes.
Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.
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