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Anastasia Piliavsky

Other affiliations: Girton College
Bio: Anastasia Piliavsky is an academic researcher from University of Cambridge. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Democracy. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 14 publications receiving 304 citations. Previous affiliations of Anastasia Piliavsky include Girton College.

Papers
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BookDOI
16 Oct 2014
TL;DR: Piliavsky as discussed by the authors discusses the political economy of patronage, pre-eminence and the state in South Asia and discusses the paradox of patronage and the People's sovereignty.
Abstract: List of illustrations Foreword John Dunn Acknowledgements Introduction Anastasia Piliavsky Part I. The Idea of Patronage in South Asia: 1. The political economy of patronage, pre-eminence and the State in Chennai Mattison Mines 2. The temporal and the spiritual, and the so-called patron-client relation in the governance of Inner Asia and Tibet D. Seyfort Ruegg 3. Remnants of patronage and the making of Tamil Valaiyar pasts Diane Mines 4. Patronage and State-making in early modern empires in India and Britain Sumit Guha Part II. Democracy as Patronage: 5. The paradox of patronage and the People's sovereignty David Gilmartin 6. India's demotic democracy and its 'depravities' in the ethnographic longue duree Anastasia Piliavsky 7. 'Vote banking' as politics in Mumbai Lisa Bjorkman 8. Political fixers in India's patronage democracy Ward Berenschot 9. Patronage and autonomy in India's deepening democracy Pamela Price, with Dusi Srinivas 10. Police and legal patronage in northern India Beatrice Jauregui 11. Patronage politics in post-Independence India Steven I. Wilkinson Part III. Prospects and Disappointments: 12. Kingship without kings in northern India Lucia Michelutti 13. The political bully in Bangladesh Arild Engelsen Ruud 14. The dark side of patronage in the Pakistani Punjab Nicolas Martin 15. Patronage and printing innovation in fifteenth-century Tibet Hildegard Diemberger 16. The im(morality) of mediation and patronage in South India and the Gulf Filippo Osella Contributors Bibliography Index.

182 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper showed that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent, drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes, including Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts.
Abstract: This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

60 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A secret is a secret in the Oxford sense: you may tell it to only one person at a time as discussed by the authors. But a secret perfectly kept dies in its circle of initiates, since their seduction lies precisely in their revelation.
Abstract: It is a secret in the Oxford sense: you may tell it to only one person at a time. ———Oliver Franks (Sunday Telegraph 1977) Common sense commodifies the secret, alienating the value of its content from its social context. But a secret perfectly kept dies in its circle of initiates. Few secrets, however, are dead on arrival, since their seduction lies precisely in their revelation. Most things said to be hidden are in fact nurtured through the processes of calculated concealment, allusion, and revelation, the secrets propagating themselves through circles of conspiracy, rumor, and gossip. As Tim Jenkins observed, “What is concealed, and the reasons for its concealment, serve to distract attention from the dynamic of the secret: what at first sight appears to be static and indeed dead, possessed by and known to only a few, kept in some dark place, in fact has a life and movement of its own; the secret propagates itself through a structure of secret and betrayal” (1999: 225–26).

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades and revealed that behind the façade-anxieties over 'criminal castes' and 'crises of crime' stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Abstract This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

28 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors investigate and question the analytical, historical, and interpretive arguments that have become common knowledge in anthropology, intuitively true and agreeable, yet rarely subject to rigorous scrutiny and discussion.
Abstract: Debates on the epistemological, ethical, and historical constitution of the anthropological corpus are one of the reasons why anthropology has always thrived. Whether in terms of the complex relation between the production of anthropological knowledge and the political systems in which it takes place, or the proliferation of the language of “mutual constitution” as a way to bypass questions of causality, the question of the “suffering” vs. the “good,” the attribution of “colonial” or “white male privilege” to ethnographic classics, or the hackneyed debates on the precariousness of academic life, contemporary anthropology is traversed by critical shortcuts, worn paths we often take, without reflecting on them. This first installment of a new journal section titled “Shortcuts” aims to investigate and question the analytical, historical, and interpretive arguments that have become common knowledge in anthropology, intuitively true and agreeable, yet rarely subject to rigorous scrutiny and discussion. The fir...

20 citations


Cited by
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01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: Familiarity, ease of access, trust, and awareness of risks, will all be important for the future.
Abstract: 萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

3,845 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, a research has been done on the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak" by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which has been explained into much simpler language about what the author conveys for better understanding and further references.
Abstract: In the present paper a research has been done on the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ by’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’. It has been explained into much simpler language about what the author conveys for better understanding and further references. Also the criticism has been done by various critiques from various sources which is helpful from examination point of view. The paper has been divided into various contexts with an introduction and the conclusions. Also the references has been written that depicts the sources of criticism.

2,638 citations

Book
05 Jul 2017
TL;DR: Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as mentioned in this paper is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world, using Fanon's incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples.
Abstract: Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things. Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule. Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

1,433 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Wacquant et al. as mentioned in this paper show that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an "underclass", but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment.
Abstract: Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

832 citations