Consider the interpellation of citizenship in neoliberal India – Cheap Homework Help

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Youth and citizenship in India. Consider the interpellation of citizenship in neoliberal India.  In contrast, perhaps, to the Nehruvian policies India’s first four decades, have new ways of being “Indian” emerged?  Are young Indians interpellated into more globalized, privatized notions of their civic duties?  Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the ways that the rise of right-wing Hindu politics and politicians has increasingly interpellated Hinduism as the true essence of India (marginalizing Muslims and others)?   Or perhaps you might consider more progressive visions of citizenship in India?

 

Term Paper Topics

 

ANT322

Anthropology of Youth Culture

University of Toronto, Dylan Clark,

Winter 2021

 

 

Overview: our course ponders the ways that youths are and have been interpellated in ideology; interpellated in terms of ethnicity, gender, “race,” nation, and—well—“youth.”   In this term paper, you’re asked to think about youth subjectivities in India.

 

This paper serves as a chance to work on course theory—Althusser, Hall, etc.—in a somewhat new context.   Theory is the operative word here.   You’re expected to denaturalize “obvious” aspects of subjectivity in your analysis.   You may want to utilize course texts and lectures to illuminate aspects of youth in your paper.   To this end, you could work with the interpellation of subjects, the (re)production of class relations,  ISAs, RSAs (Althusser), diaspora (Hall 1996), waithood (Honwanna, Dobler), neoliberal subjectivity (Kaur, “Icons”),  the commodification of identity (LaBennett, Collins), the malleability of “race” or ethnicity (Roth-Gordon), patriarchal capitalism (Yang, Meng & Huang, Carrico, Yamaguchi), the ideological struggles over popular culture (Hall 1981).

 

Per the lecture on Feb 5, you’re trying to localize culture, while also keeping track of larger ideological, economic, and political contexts.  Thus, you may also want to try to situate youths within the political-economy of neoliberalism in India.   Kaur, Woronov, Cho & Stark, and Schwak point at ways to think about the discourses of national branding, intersubjective competition, and the ways individuals are interpellated in terms of worth.   How are these ideas playing out in terms of youths in India?

 

We’re applying critical theory—feminist/queer/critical-race/Marxist/etc.—to “youth,” and your paper will continue in this vein.    That is, your paper should take care to situate youths in discourse, to consider the political-economy in context, and to question “obvious” norms.   For example, you would want to avoid a paper that claims “Indian society is X, so therefor these girls are doing Y.”  Similarly, one wants to go beyond a simple paper about resistance to power (“Queer Indians resist norms”).   In other words, your paper is going past the “obvious” notions about nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and more.   Don’t worry: after many weeks in the course, this will come a lot easier.

 

A basic requirement for this paper is to get beyond generalizations about India, Hinduism, “masculinity” patriarchy, and so on.  That is to say, if your paper is uncritically referencing “the culture of India,” or “Hindu values,” or “the traditional Indian family,” it may exhibit a poor understanding of concepts in ANT322.  To be clear, we’re challenging the idea that girls, India, history, youths form natural categories.  We’re challenging the idea that there are fundamental essences that inhabit such concepts as the nation, the male body, Hinduism, and modernity.   That doesn’t mean we can’t write about the idea of, say, “traditional village life in India,” but it does mean that we do so critically.

 

One way to step beyond crude essentialism is to give your paper are narrower focus.  Let’s say for example you’re interested in aspects of “femininity” for young Indian woman.   Well, good, but you’re not discussing all young women in India, you’re discussing a small subset of women in a narrow band of space and time.   You’re not discussing everything about this group of young women; only the ways in which they’re interacting with discourses of value in the “marriage market.”  You’re not assuming that “femininity” actually something that   they have or don’t have, but rather are critically seeing these women attempt to grapple with such discourses.

 

Here are some possible topics with which to sharpen your focus in India:

 

 

Youth and citizenship in India.

Consider the interpellation of citizenship in neoliberal India.  In contrast, perhaps, to the Nehruvian policies India’s first four decades, have new ways of being “Indian” emerged?  Are young Indians interpellated into more globalized, privatized notions of their civic duties?  Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the ways that the rise of right-wing Hindu politics and politicians has increasingly interpellated Hinduism as the true essence of India (marginalizing Muslims and others)?   Or perhaps you might consider more progressive visions of citizenship in India?

 

The political-economy of waithood in India

What does it mean to have to wait, for the arrival of adulthood and/or for the “development” of the nation?   How might one situate the question of waiting in relation to neoliberalism in India?  Note that these queries would have very different outcomes, depending on one’s focus.   Questions of gender, women’s or queer liberation, a delayed profession, caste discrimination, and so on, could be ways to sharpen the focus.

 

 

Below are some sources you may want to include in your paper:

 

Advani, Rahul. “Maps, Movements and Mobilities: Facebook and ‘Checking-in’ among Young Men in Pune, India.” Space and Polity 24, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 60–76. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/13562576.2019.1667762

 

Annavarapu, Sneha. 2018. “Consuming Wellness, Producing Difference: The Case of a Wellness Center in India.” Journal of Consumer Culture 18(3): 414–32. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1177%2F1469540516682583

 

Banerjee, Swapna. 2015. “Emergent Youth Culture in 19^th-Century India: A View from Colonial Bengal,” IN Christine Feldman-Barrett (ed), Lost Histories of Youth Culture, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 199-216.  [This is quite historical, so you’d need to work with the TA to identify further sources about how “youth” mobilized against colonialism in Bengal and/or in other parts of India.]

 

Chandra, Nandini. 2010. “Young Protest: The Idea of Merit in Commercial Hindi Cinema.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30(1): 119-132. https://muse-jhu-edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/article/381424

 

Deuchar, Andrew. 2014. “Ambivalence and Optimism: The Contradictory Meanings of Education for Lower Middle Class Young Men in Dehradun, India.” Geoforum 55: 143–51. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.06.005

 

Deuchar, Andrew. 2019. “Strategically ‘Out of Place’: Unemployed Migrants Mobilizing Rural and Urban Identities in North India.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(5): 1379–93. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/24694452.2018.1541402

 

Deuchar, Andrew, and Jane Dyson. 2020. “Between Unemployment and Enterprise in Neoliberal India: Educated Youth Creating Work in the Private Education Sector.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(4): 706–18. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1111/tran.12364

 

Doron, Assa. 2016. “Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39(4): 715–39. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00856401.2016.1218096

 

Jeffrey, Craig, and Jane Dyson. 2014. “‘I Serve Therefore I Am’: Youth and Generative Politics in India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56(4): 967–94. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1017/S0010417514000462

 

Jeffrey, Craig, and Jane Dyson.  2016.  “Now: Prefigurative Politics through a North Indian Lens.” Economy and Society 45(1): 77–100. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/03085147.2016.1143725

 

Jeffrey, Craig. 2010. Timepass: youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. https://search.library.utoronto.ca/details?7299127 [You can also find Jeffrey’s published essays on the UT Library system.]

Jeffrey, Craig. “Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 37(3): 465-81 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40784609

Jeffrey, Craig. 2011.  “Great Expectations: Youth in Contemporary India: A Companion to the Anthropology of India,” edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès. Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, http://go.utlib.ca/cat/8114609 pp. 62-79.

Karlsson, Bengt G. & Dolly Kikon. 2017. “Wayfinding: Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India, South Asia,” Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:3, 447-462, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1319145

 

Kikon, Dolly & Bengt G. Karlsson. 2020. “Light Skin and Soft Skills: Training Indigenous Migrants for the Hospitality Sector in India,” Ethnos, 85:2, 258-275. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00141844.2018.1543717

 

Krishnan, Sneha. 2020. “Scooty girls are safe girls: risk, respectability and brand assemblages in urban India,” Social & Cultural Geography, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/14649365.2020.1744705

 

Krishnan, Sneha. 2020.  “Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai,” Gender, Place & Culture, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1770204

 

Krøijer, Marie Kolling & Atreyee Sen. 2020. “Ruins and Rhythms of Development and Life After Progress,” Ethnos.  https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00141844.2020.1725092  [Ignore bits about Brazil and Germany; one section on Mumbai.  Consider, perhaps, questions of “waiting” for development?]

 

Marrow, Jocelyn. 2013. “Feminine Power or Feminine Weakness? North Indian Girls’ Struggles with Aspirations, Agency, and Psychosomatic Illness.” American Ethnologist 40(2): 347-61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24027338.

 

Nakassis, Constantine V. 2014. “Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India.” Current Anthropology 55(2): 175-99.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675246

Strohl, David James. 2019. “Love jihad in India’s moral imaginaries: religion, kinship, and citizenship in late liberalism,” Contemporary South Asia, 27:1, 27-39, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/09584935.2018.1528209

Sen, Atreyee, Raminder Kaur & Emilija Zabiliūtė. 2020. “(En)countering sexual violence in the Indian city,” Gender, Place & Culture, 27:1, 1-12, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1612856

Tyagi, Aastha & Atreyee Sen. 2020. “Love-Jihad (Muslim Sexual Seduction) and ched-chad (sexual harassment): Hindu nationalist discourses and the Ideal/deviant urban citizen in India,” Gender, Place & Culture, 27:1, 104-25. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1557602

 

Again, please bear in mind that you’re doing critical theory, not a policy paper.   For example, suppose, in your essay you’re examining citizenship in India.  Rather than see citizenship through a factual lens, as something that one does or does not possess, or as a law that is or is not respected, you would examine citizenship as an inherently ambivalent and unequal field, and attempt to theorize its uneven distributions.  Your job would NOT to be correct the errors of citizenship in India.  In other words, you will not conclude that citizenship in India is X, but it should be Y.  You would not conclude that sexism or Islamophobia is wrong and that the state of India should treat all citizens equally.  In other words, you will NOT conclude that citizenship should be a status which entitles its members to equal rights under the law.  No, my students, your task is far more challenging than that…

Please remember: our topic is the anthropology of youth.   If you’re not careful, you may end up with sources that are not anthropological and a topic that begins to stray into other terrain.   If finding additional sources, you’ll be better off making sure that the author(s) is/are anthropologists, and/or that the publication is an anthropological one.

 

• Consider focusing on one part of India.  This is a massive country in almost any metric, so your paper will lack credibility if you speak of it as a singular, unified place.  Instead, you can hone in a locale: in each part of India there are different politics about Islam, caste, Hindutva, and more.   Thus, your thesis can be more compelling if you narrow your focus.  What’s happening for low-caste women in Hyderabad would probably have little in common with rich Muslim women living in Kolkata.
• A place-based focus also enables you to eliminate a ton of scholarship—it not only makes your paper better, it makes your job easier.
• Your paper MUST include some direct quotes from your sources, in quotation marks, like this:  “Indonesian is a language without extensive historical memories and connotations… as such, it is par excellence the language of youth and rebellion” (Anderson 1990: 140).
• Whenever using more than a few matching words from a text, quotation marks must be used.
• EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE DERIVED FROM ANOTHER SOURCE MUST BE CITED, usually with a page number.   If your paper does not do this, it will either be reported for plagiarism (if cheating seems intentional) or (more likely) sent back to you, unmarked, for revisions.
• These sources were painstakingly put together, so as to help you channel your writing within the spirit of ANT322.  You don’t have to use them, but they’ve been chosen as sources that could help you move in a productive direction.  That is: your paper should be informed by anthropology and critique.  Journals of business, communication, sociology, or poli-sci are likely to steer you off course.
• This handout took your instructor countless hours, over the span of many days.  Shouldn’t you put in at least that much effort into the paper itself?
• Getting off to a good start: carefully curate your sources.  Look for a suite of sources that complement one another, in terms of topic and locality.  Your TA can help.
• Time and time again, you may be tempted to see backwardness as the problem: if only India were more “modern” in its views towards women, Dalits, Muslims, the poor, and so on.  British imperialists would agree…
• Time and time again, you may be tempted to see discrimination as the problem.  There is prejudice against Muslims, women, Dalits, etc.  But if you stop there, you have only retraced what everyone already “knows”: discrimination is bad and ignorant, and it must be abolished.  That’s not good enough for ANT322. You’ll have to be more sophisticated in your analysis…
• Here are some sentences to avoid: “In today’s India,” “Traditionally in India, it is believed that…,” “Muslims in India are viewed as…,” “India is the world’s second most populous country…,” “Women in India still suffer from…,” “Despite progress, India has not yet…”

 

Feel free to cut and paste the sources above into your bibliography, but please remove my additions [in brackets].  If it’s in your bibliography, it was cited.  Sources not cited should not appear your bibliography.

 

Format and general remarks:

• Write a paper of 2000-3500 words (not counting notes)(approximately 8-14 pages), double-spaced, typed, in Times New Roman font with 1 inch top, bottom, margins (in “page setup”). Please use the course texts, lecture notes (if relevant), and other scholarly sources at your discretion.
• If your paper focuses almost entirely on required readings, it will not be a passing paper. By making significant use of sources not on the syllabus your paper will be more insightful: you will be applying and extending your ANT322 knowledge to further material.
• All quotes and paraphrasing must be cited with inline citations that show author and page. Something like,

Jakarta’s public streets were used by protestors to locate and produce “youth” voices as “of the people” (Lee 2011: 137).

Because commodities may offer only fleeting class distinction, some people may feel pressured into inflationary consumerism (Clark 2018c).

“…the success of de facto resistance is often directly proportional to the symbolic conformity with which it is masked” (Scott 1985: 93).

• Plagiarism is the use of unattributed quotes or information, or recycling of your own words from another course. Give credit to your sources, and do your own original work.
• Normally, papers submitted on Quercus will automatically be uploaded to Turninin.com, unless a student petitions the instructor otherwise. This website will check the paper for academic integrity.
• A bibliography of sources used should appear at the end, alphabetized by author’s last name. Please feel free to cut and paste from the this sheet or syllabus.
• A unique title for the paper is required (not “Term paper” or “Topic A” or “ANT322 paper”).
• Papers should exhibit a well-defined, argumentative thesis and defend this thesis with data in the form of page-numbered, in-line citations.  Papers should demonstrate a high level of comprehension of course concepts.    A thesis ought to be a claim that others might not agree with: a claim that needs to be proven with data and theoretical underpinning. An ineffectual thesis might be: “Youth is an important political idea in India.”  Isn’t that a bit obvious?  Another weak thesis would be: “Subcultural music can provide ‘youth’ with a sense of purpose.”  Again: where’s the argument?  Or: “I will explore issues of female beauty and marriage in Delhi.”  That’s a topic, not a thesis.  After taking a strong position, you will need to bring textual evidence and theoretical material to help shore up the paper.
• Your paper should not compare areas, but rather focus on a single place, and likely a narrow time.
• Your paper should cite at least three different authors. Rather than having a paragraph on author A, then another on author B, and so on, try to work authors into a conversation and organize paragraphs according to sub-topics.
• In other words: the successful paper will lay out an original argument of its own and use others’ work to substantiate its position.  The successful paper will not simply paraphrase required texts from the course syllabus, but will utilize other texts to bring original insight and data to course concepts.  And, rather than blandly paraphrase one author per paragraph, the successful paper will integrate scholars into themed paragraphs, most of which have a topic sentence (often, but not always, the first sentence in a paragraph), and all of which work towards the fulfillment of the thesis.
• The paper should employ course themes.  Try to keep your paper narrowly focused (not comparative), non-opinionated, and not policy oriented.  Please do not simply write a book report or a summary of the materials: try to find an original thesis that weaves your sources and data together.  Questions?  Let’s work together on the Discussion Board.
• Please qualify terms throughout your paper. Please don’t say “Middle class Indians believe…” or “Muslim youths want…” or “men desire…”  Each one of these statements homogenizes and simplifies human and cultural diversity, and this course is predicated a different epistemology.  Scare quotes (“…” ), and words such as some, many, and might can help to point to the relational qualities of culture, subjectivity, and power.
• A key to your paper is Any paper attempting to discuss “hip hop” or “Muslim youth,” or “stereotyping of girls” sets itself up to disappoint.  Instead, zero in on an incredibly focused aspect of a ‘youth’ discourse.  Your theoretical analysis ought to be limited as well: if your paper is trying to come to terms with race, gender, commodification, and resistance in several pages, it probably will feel unconvincing and vague.
• Please avoid the terms “we” and “our” and “us.” This interpellates the reader in a “shared” culture which may be problematic.
• Instead of speaking of “symbolizing” strive to show how ideas are produced. In other words, femininity is not simply symbolized with a certain hairstyle, it is produced or performed through that style (in a given community, fluent in such codes).
• Understand that words such as “middle class,” “freedom,” “Tamil,” “success,” and “masculinity,” are not based in some objective clarity, but rather are discourses—intersections of ideas, ideologies, subjects, institutions, and practices—saturated with complexity, contradictions, slippages, contests, and ideologies.
• Do not restate dominant ideologies about “globalization,” “freedom,” “success,” “modernizing,” “developing,” “economic growth,” or any other forms which imagine a natural trajectory of human desire, rights, happiness, and progress. Those ideologies do not belong in this course.
• Try to avoid the sense that “forces” are all-determining and leave subjects with no choice. Please be careful not to depict “the state,” “the nation,” or “the market” as solid, sure, deliberate entities that “want” things, that have clear motives, that are fixed and uniform.  Try to instead depict institutions and power as relational, as working through co-production in ideology and the interpellation of subjects, who in turn perform, reify, and practice these forces.
• Let your scholarly sources lead your paper: let them help set a scholarly tone of critical analysis.
• Keep your opinions about what “we should” do out of the paper. Your conclusion is your thesis, not a policy prescription.  Please do not try to fix or improve.  (Indeed, you might do the opposite: interrogate discourses of improvement in Asia…)
• Visit the library and/or Writing Centre, where you can get free, professional advice on how to find excellent scholarly sources and how to structure your paper. Even the most advanced student can learn from the experts.  Highly recommended.   Make an appointment now: they are overbooked.
• Indent paragraphs. Two spaces after every period. Page numbers.
• Draft, edit, rewrite, proofread.

 

Images:

Top: 2020 Mumbai protests against violence, in solidarity with JNU students in New Delhi.  https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/jnu-violence-live-updates-abvp-goons-jnusu-clash-delhi-police-students-teachers-injured-delhi-mumbai-protest-1634245-2020-01-06

Bottom: Pandey, Amit. 2020.  “How Punjabi youth are using social media to back up farmer protests, and counter ‘Godi Media’ “ Dec. 4, 2020.  NewsLaundry.com. https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/12/04/how-punjabi-youth-are-using-social-media-to-back-up-farmer-protests-and-counter-godi-media

 

Term Paper Topics

 

ANT322

Anthropology of Youth Culture

University of Toronto, Dylan Clark,

Winter 2021

 

 

Overview: our course ponders the ways that youths are and have been interpellated in ideology; interpellated in terms of ethnicity, gender, “race,” nation, and—well—“youth.”   In this term paper, you’re asked to think about youth subjectivities in India.

 

This paper serves as a chance to work on course theory—Althusser, Hall, etc.—in a somewhat new context.   Theory is the operative word here.   You’re expected to denaturalize “obvious” aspects of subjectivity in your analysis.   You may want to utilize course texts and lectures to illuminate aspects of youth in your paper.   To this end, you could work with the interpellation of subjects, the (re)production of class relations,  ISAs, RSAs (Althusser), diaspora (Hall 1996), waithood (Honwanna, Dobler), neoliberal subjectivity (Kaur, “Icons”),  the commodification of identity (LaBennett, Collins), the malleability of “race” or ethnicity (Roth-Gordon), patriarchal capitalism (Yang, Meng & Huang, Carrico, Yamaguchi), the ideological struggles over popular culture (Hall 1981).

 

Per the lecture on Feb 5, you’re trying to localize culture, while also keeping track of larger ideological, economic, and political contexts.  Thus, you may also want to try to situate youths within the political-economy of neoliberalism in India.   Kaur, Woronov, Cho & Stark, and Schwak point at ways to think about the discourses of national branding, intersubjective competition, and the ways individuals are interpellated in terms of worth.   How are these ideas playing out in terms of youths in India?

 

We’re applying critical theory—feminist/queer/critical-race/Marxist/etc.—to “youth,” and your paper will continue in this vein.    That is, your paper should take care to situate youths in discourse, to consider the political-economy in context, and to question “obvious” norms.   For example, you would want to avoid a paper that claims “Indian society is X, so therefor these girls are doing Y.”  Similarly, one wants to go beyond a simple paper about resistance to power (“Queer Indians resist norms”).   In other words, your paper is going past the “obvious” notions about nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and more.   Don’t worry: after many weeks in the course, this will come a lot easier.

 

A basic requirement for this paper is to get beyond generalizations about India, Hinduism, “masculinity” patriarchy, and so on.  That is to say, if your paper is uncritically referencing “the culture of India,” or “Hindu values,” or “the traditional Indian family,” it may exhibit a poor understanding of concepts in ANT322.  To be clear, we’re challenging the idea that girls, India, history, youths form natural categories.  We’re challenging the idea that there are fundamental essences that inhabit such concepts as the nation, the male body, Hinduism, and modernity.   That doesn’t mean we can’t write about the idea of, say, “traditional village life in India,” but it does mean that we do so critically.

 

One way to step beyond crude essentialism is to give your paper are narrower focus.  Let’s say for example you’re interested in aspects of “femininity” for young Indian woman.   Well, good, but you’re not discussing all young women in India, you’re discussing a small subset of women in a narrow band of space and time.   You’re not discussing everything about this group of young women; only the ways in which they’re interacting with discourses of value in the “marriage market.”  You’re not assuming that “femininity” actually something that   they have or don’t have, but rather are critically seeing these women attempt to grapple with such discourses.

 

Here are some possible topics with which to sharpen your focus in India:

 

 

Youth and citizenship in India.

Consider the interpellation of citizenship in neoliberal India.  In contrast, perhaps, to the Nehruvian policies India’s first four decades, have new ways of being “Indian” emerged?  Are young Indians interpellated into more globalized, privatized notions of their civic duties?  Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the ways that the rise of right-wing Hindu politics and politicians has increasingly interpellated Hinduism as the true essence of India (marginalizing Muslims and others)?   Or perhaps you might consider more progressive visions of citizenship in India?

 

The political-economy of waithood in India

What does it mean to have to wait, for the arrival of adulthood and/or for the “development” of the nation?   How might one situate the question of waiting in relation to neoliberalism in India?  Note that these queries would have very different outcomes, depending on one’s focus.   Questions of gender, women’s or queer liberation, a delayed profession, caste discrimination, and so on, could be ways to sharpen the focus.

 

 

Below are some sources you may want to include in your paper:

 

Advani, Rahul. “Maps, Movements and Mobilities: Facebook and ‘Checking-in’ among Young Men in Pune, India.” Space and Polity 24, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 60–76. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/13562576.2019.1667762

 

Annavarapu, Sneha. 2018. “Consuming Wellness, Producing Difference: The Case of a Wellness Center in India.” Journal of Consumer Culture 18(3): 414–32. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1177%2F1469540516682583

 

Banerjee, Swapna. 2015. “Emergent Youth Culture in 19^th-Century India: A View from Colonial Bengal,” IN Christine Feldman-Barrett (ed), Lost Histories of Youth Culture, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 199-216.  [This is quite historical, so you’d need to work with the TA to identify further sources about how “youth” mobilized against colonialism in Bengal and/or in other parts of India.]

 

Chandra, Nandini. 2010. “Young Protest: The Idea of Merit in Commercial Hindi Cinema.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30(1): 119-132. https://muse-jhu-edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/article/381424

 

Deuchar, Andrew. 2014. “Ambivalence and Optimism: The Contradictory Meanings of Education for Lower Middle Class Young Men in Dehradun, India.” Geoforum 55: 143–51. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.06.005

 

Deuchar, Andrew. 2019. “Strategically ‘Out of Place’: Unemployed Migrants Mobilizing Rural and Urban Identities in North India.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(5): 1379–93. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/24694452.2018.1541402

 

Deuchar, Andrew, and Jane Dyson. 2020. “Between Unemployment and Enterprise in Neoliberal India: Educated Youth Creating Work in the Private Education Sector.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(4): 706–18. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1111/tran.12364

 

Doron, Assa. 2016. “Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39(4): 715–39. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00856401.2016.1218096

 

Jeffrey, Craig, and Jane Dyson. 2014. “‘I Serve Therefore I Am’: Youth and Generative Politics in India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56(4): 967–94. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1017/S0010417514000462

 

Jeffrey, Craig, and Jane Dyson.  2016.  “Now: Prefigurative Politics through a North Indian Lens.” Economy and Society 45(1): 77–100. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/03085147.2016.1143725

 

Jeffrey, Craig. 2010. Timepass: youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. https://search.library.utoronto.ca/details?7299127 [You can also find Jeffrey’s published essays on the UT Library system.]

Jeffrey, Craig. “Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 37(3): 465-81 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40784609

Jeffrey, Craig. 2011.  “Great Expectations: Youth in Contemporary India: A Companion to the Anthropology of India,” edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès. Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, http://go.utlib.ca/cat/8114609 pp. 62-79.

Karlsson, Bengt G. & Dolly Kikon. 2017. “Wayfinding: Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India, South Asia,” Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:3, 447-462, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1319145

 

Kikon, Dolly & Bengt G. Karlsson. 2020. “Light Skin and Soft Skills: Training Indigenous Migrants for the Hospitality Sector in India,” Ethnos, 85:2, 258-275. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00141844.2018.1543717

 

Krishnan, Sneha. 2020. “Scooty girls are safe girls: risk, respectability and brand assemblages in urban India,” Social & Cultural Geography, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/14649365.2020.1744705

 

Krishnan, Sneha. 2020.  “Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai,” Gender, Place & Culture, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1770204

 

Krøijer, Marie Kolling & Atreyee Sen. 2020. “Ruins and Rhythms of Development and Life After Progress,” Ethnos.  https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00141844.2020.1725092  [Ignore bits about Brazil and Germany; one section on Mumbai.  Consider, perhaps, questions of “waiting” for development?]

 

Marrow, Jocelyn. 2013. “Feminine Power or Feminine Weakness? North Indian Girls’ Struggles with Aspirations, Agency, and Psychosomatic Illness.” American Ethnologist 40(2): 347-61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24027338.

 

Nakassis, Constantine V. 2014. “Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India.” Current Anthropology 55(2): 175-99.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675246

Strohl, David James. 2019. “Love jihad in India’s moral imaginaries: religion, kinship, and citizenship in late liberalism,” Contemporary South Asia, 27:1, 27-39, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/09584935.2018.1528209

Sen, Atreyee, Raminder Kaur & Emilija Zabiliūtė. 2020. “(En)countering sexual violence in the Indian city,” Gender, Place & Culture, 27:1, 1-12, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1612856

Tyagi, Aastha & Atreyee Sen. 2020. “Love-Jihad (Muslim Sexual Seduction) and ched-chad (sexual harassment): Hindu nationalist discourses and the Ideal/deviant urban citizen in India,” Gender, Place & Culture, 27:1, 104-25. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1557602

 

Again, please bear in mind that you’re doing critical theory, not a policy paper.   For example, suppose, in your essay you’re examining citizenship in India.  Rather than see citizenship through a factual lens, as something that one does or does not possess, or as a law that is or is not respected, you would examine citizenship as an inherently ambivalent and unequal field, and attempt to theorize its uneven distributions.  Your job would NOT to be correct the errors of citizenship in India.  In other words, you will not conclude that citizenship in India is X, but it should be Y.  You would not conclude that sexism or Islamophobia is wrong and that the state of India should treat all citizens equally.  In other words, you will NOT conclude that citizenship should be a status which entitles its members to equal rights under the law.  No, my students, your task is far more challenging than that…

Please remember: our topic is the anthropology of youth.   If you’re not careful, you may end up with sources that are not anthropological and a topic that begins to stray into other terrain.   If finding additional sources, you’ll be better off making sure that the author(s) is/are anthropologists, and/or that the publication is an anthropological one.

 

• Consider focusing on one part of India.  This is a massive country in almost any metric, so your paper will lack credibility if you speak of it as a singular, unified place.  Instead, you can hone in a locale: in each part of India there are different politics about Islam, caste, Hindutva, and more.   Thus, your thesis can be more compelling if you narrow your focus.  What’s happening for low-caste women in Hyderabad would probably have little in common with rich Muslim women living in Kolkata.
• A place-based focus also enables you to eliminate a ton of scholarship—it not only makes your paper better, it makes your job easier.
• Your paper MUST include some direct quotes from your sources, in quotation marks, like this:  “Indonesian is a language without extensive historical memories and connotations… as such, it is par excellence the language of youth and rebellion” (Anderson 1990: 140).
• Whenever using more than a few matching words from a text, quotation marks must be used.
• EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE DERIVED FROM ANOTHER SOURCE MUST BE CITED, usually with a page number.   If your paper does not do this, it will either be reported for plagiarism (if cheating seems intentional) or (more likely) sent back to you, unmarked, for revisions.
• These sources were painstakingly put together, so as to help you channel your writing within the spirit of ANT322.  You don’t have to use them, but they’ve been chosen as sources that could help you move in a productive direction.  That is: your paper should be informed by anthropology and critique.  Journals of business, communication, sociology, or poli-sci are likely to steer you off course.
• This handout took your instructor countless hours, over the span of many days.  Shouldn’t you put in at least that much effort into the paper itself?
• Getting off to a good start: carefully curate your sources.  Look for a suite of sources that complement one another, in terms of topic and locality.  Your TA can help.
• Time and time again, you may be tempted to see backwardness as the problem: if only India were more “modern” in its views towards women, Dalits, Muslims, the poor, and so on.  British imperialists would agree…
• Time and time again, you may be tempted to see discrimination as the problem.  There is prejudice against Muslims, women, Dalits, etc.  But if you stop there, you have only retraced what everyone already “knows”: discrimination is bad and ignorant, and it must be abolished.  That’s not good enough for ANT322. You’ll have to be more sophisticated in your analysis…
• Here are some sentences to avoid: “In today’s India,” “Traditionally in India, it is believed that…,” “Muslims in India are viewed as…,” “India is the world’s second most populous country…,” “Women in India still suffer from…,” “Despite progress, India has not yet…”

 

Feel free to cut and paste the sources above into your bibliography, but please remove my additions [in brackets].  If it’s in your bibliography, it was cited.  Sources not cited should not appear your bibliography.

 

Format and general remarks:

• Write a paper of 2000-3500 words (not counting notes)(approximately 8-14 pages), double-spaced, typed, in Times New Roman font with 1 inch top, bottom, margins (in “page setup”). Please use the course texts, lecture notes (if relevant), and other scholarly sources at your discretion.
• If your paper focuses almost entirely on required readings, it will not be a passing paper. By making significant use of sources not on the syllabus your paper will be more insightful: you will be applying and extending your ANT322 knowledge to further material.
• All quotes and paraphrasing must be cited with inline citations that show author and page. Something like,

Jakarta’s public streets were used by protestors to locate and produce “youth” voices as “of the people” (Lee 2011: 137).

Because commodities may offer only fleeting class distinction, some people may feel pressured into inflationary consumerism (Clark 2018c).

“…the success of de facto resistance is often directly proportional to the symbolic conformity with which it is masked” (Scott 1985: 93).

• Plagiarism is the use of unattributed quotes or information, or recycling of your own words from another course. Give credit to your sources, and do your own original work.
• Normally, papers submitted on Quercus will automatically be uploaded to Turninin.com, unless a student petitions the instructor otherwise. This website will check the paper for academic integrity.
• A bibliography of sources used should appear at the end, alphabetized by author’s last name. Please feel free to cut and paste from the this sheet or syllabus.
• A unique title for the paper is required (not “Term paper” or “Topic A” or “ANT322 paper”).
• Papers should exhibit a well-defined, argumentative thesis and defend this thesis with data in the form of page-numbered, in-line citations.  Papers should demonstrate a high level of comprehension of course concepts.    A thesis ought to be a claim that others might not agree with: a claim that needs to be proven with data and theoretical underpinning. An ineffectual thesis might be: “Youth is an important political idea in India.”  Isn’t that a bit obvious?  Another weak thesis would be: “Subcultural music can provide ‘youth’ with a sense of purpose.”  Again: where’s the argument?  Or: “I will explore issues of female beauty and marriage in Delhi.”  That’s a topic, not a thesis.  After taking a strong position, you will need to bring textual evidence and theoretical material to help shore up the paper.
• Your paper should not compare areas, but rather focus on a single place, and likely a narrow time.
• Your paper should cite at least three different authors. Rather than having a paragraph on author A, then another on author B, and so on, try to work authors into a conversation and organize paragraphs according to sub-topics.
• In other words: the successful paper will lay out an original argument of its own and use others’ work to substantiate its position.  The successful paper will not simply paraphrase required texts from the course syllabus, but will utilize other texts to bring original insight and data to course concepts.  And, rather than blandly paraphrase one author per paragraph, the successful paper will integrate scholars into themed paragraphs, most of which have a topic sentence (often, but not always, the first sentence in a paragraph), and all of which work towards the fulfillment of the thesis.
• The paper should employ course themes.  Try to keep your paper narrowly focused (not comparative), non-opinionated, and not policy oriented.  Please do not simply write a book report or a summary of the materials: try to find an original thesis that weaves your sources and data together.  Questions?  Let’s work together on the Discussion Board.
• Please qualify terms throughout your paper. Please don’t say “Middle class Indians believe…” or “Muslim youths want…” or “men desire…”  Each one of these statements homogenizes and simplifies human and cultural diversity, and this course is predicated a different epistemology.  Scare quotes (“…” ), and words such as some, many, and might can help to point to the relational qualities of culture, subjectivity, and power.
• A key to your paper is Any paper attempting to discuss “hip hop” or “Muslim youth,” or “stereotyping of girls” sets itself up to disappoint.  Instead, zero in on an incredibly focused aspect of a ‘youth’ discourse.  Your theoretical analysis ought to be limited as well: if your paper is trying to come to terms with race, gender, commodification, and resistance in several pages, it probably will feel unconvincing and vague.
• Please avoid the terms “we” and “our” and “us.” This interpellates the reader in a “shared” culture which may be problematic.
• Instead of speaking of “symbolizing” strive to show how ideas are produced. In other words, femininity is not simply symbolized with a certain hairstyle, it is produced or performed through that style (in a given community, fluent in such codes).
• Understand that words such as “middle class,” “freedom,” “Tamil,” “success,” and “masculinity,” are not based in some objective clarity, but rather are discourses—intersections of ideas, ideologies, subjects, institutions, and practices—saturated with complexity, contradictions, slippages, contests, and ideologies.
• Do not restate dominant ideologies about “globalization,” “freedom,” “success,” “modernizing,” “developing,” “economic growth,” or any other forms which imagine a natural trajectory of human desire, rights, happiness, and progress. Those ideologies do not belong in this course.
• Try to avoid the sense that “forces” are all-determining and leave subjects with no choice. Please be careful not to depict “the state,” “the nation,” or “the market” as solid, sure, deliberate entities that “want” things, that have clear motives, that are fixed and uniform.  Try to instead depict institutions and power as relational, as working through co-production in ideology and the interpellation of subjects, who in turn perform, reify, and practice these forces.
• Let your scholarly sources lead your paper: let them help set a scholarly tone of critical analysis.
• Keep your opinions about what “we should” do out of the paper. Your conclusion is your thesis, not a policy prescription.  Please do not try to fix or improve.  (Indeed, you might do the opposite: interrogate discourses of improvement in Asia…)
• Visit the library and/or Writing Centre, where you can get free, professional advice on how to find excellent scholarly sources and how to structure your paper. Even the most advanced student can learn from the experts.  Highly recommended.   Make an appointment now: they are overbooked.
• Indent paragraphs. Two spaces after every period. Page numbers.
• Draft, edit, rewrite, proofread.

 

Images:

Top: 2020 Mumbai protests against violence, in solidarity with JNU students in New Delhi.  https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/jnu-violence-live-updates-abvp-goons-jnusu-clash-delhi-police-students-teachers-injured-delhi-mumbai-protest-1634245-2020-01-06

Bottom: Pandey, Amit. 2020.  “How Punjabi youth are using social media to back up farmer protests, and counter ‘Godi Media’ “ Dec. 4, 2020.  NewsLaundry.com. https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/12/04/how-punjabi-youth-are-using-social-media-to-back-up-farmer-protests-and-counter-godi-media