Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface/Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: Masculinities in South Asia
- 2 How to Make a Man?
- 3 Working Men's Lives
- 4 Men of Substance: Earning and Spending
- 5 Producing Heterosexuality: Flirting and Romancing
- 6 Negotiating Heterosexuality: Pornography, Masturbation and ‘Secret Love’
- 7 Homosocial Spaces: The Sabarimala Pilgrimage
- 8 Masculine Styles: Young Men and Movie Heroes
- 9 Conclusions
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
1 - Introduction: Masculinities in South Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface/Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: Masculinities in South Asia
- 2 How to Make a Man?
- 3 Working Men's Lives
- 4 Men of Substance: Earning and Spending
- 5 Producing Heterosexuality: Flirting and Romancing
- 6 Negotiating Heterosexuality: Pornography, Masturbation and ‘Secret Love’
- 7 Homosocial Spaces: The Sabarimala Pilgrimage
- 8 Masculine Styles: Young Men and Movie Heroes
- 9 Conclusions
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
About this book
This book draws together work we have written over the last 15 years, which has been concerned with exploring masculinity in a south Asian context. The specific context we have worked in is that of a rural paddygrowing panchayat (which we have anonymized as ‘Valiyagramam’) in the central part of Kerala, South India. We undertook several periods of fieldwork here, from 1989 to 2001. Here, we worked mostly among Hindus but also at times with members of the minority Christian populations (split between various denominations). There were no Muslim families in this village. Since 2002, we have shifted field-site and now work in Calicut town in northern Kerala. Again we are working among the locally dominant community (in this case Muslim traders) and again we are paying attention to ways in which objectifications of identity are projected, for example through the practices of consumption. What has become clear to us, since 2002, is the degree to which several themes found in south Asian ethnography generally and in our own earlier work may be highly specific to rural Hindu contexts. The continuing observance of some forms of untouchability and the belief that character and body-type are strongly correlated would be one (Osella and Osella 1996, 2000b).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Men and Masculinities in India , pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2006