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The Fall of Gods

Memory, Kinship, and Middle Classes in South India

Ester Gallo author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:OUP India

Published:14th Sep '17

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The Fall of Gods cover

Interrogating the cultural roots of contemporary Malayali middle classes, especially the upper caste Nambudiri community, The Fall of Gods is based on a decade-long ethnography and historico-sociological analyses of the interconnections between colonial history, family memories, and class mobility in twentieth-century south India. It traces the transformation of normative structures of kinship networks as the community moves from colonial to neo-liberal modernity across generations. The author demonstrates how past family experiences of class and geographical mobility (or immobility) are retrieved and reshaped in the present as alternative ways of conceiving kinship, transforming the idea of collective suffering and sacrifice, and strengthening the felt necessity of territorial, caste, and religious mingling. Rich in anthropological detail and incisive analyses, the book makes original contributions to the understanding of connection between gendered family relations and class mobility, and foregrounds the complex linkages between political history, memory, and the private domain of kinship relations in the making of Indias middle classes.

Ester Gallo has given a wonderfully nuanced, beautifully written, and innovative account of kinship, memory, and class in India. This is not only a major contribution to scholarship on class, it will be an important point of reference in the study of kinship and memory more widely.' * Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom *
This fascinating study challenges easy assumptions about the role of the past in the present and emphasizes the role of kinship studies as part of the analysis of class formation in South Asia and beyond. * Henrike Donner, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom *
A completely novel approach to understanding middle classes in modern India, at the intersections of caste, kinship, and mobility! An exceptional anthropological study and fascinating read. * Meenakshi Thapan, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India *

ISBN: 9780199469307

Dimensions: 222mm x 150mm x 28mm

Weight: 546g

352 pages