Cleansing Pavam
Download Cleansing Pavam PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Cleansing Pavam book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Cleansing Pavam
Environmental squalor is a salient feature of Indian cities, standing in surprising contrast to clean private settings. This study of ideas and practices relating to cleanliness in a South Indian town found that im/purity concepts pertaining to hygiene are closely related to so-called ritual ideas of purity and pollution and are nearer to orthodox beliefs than to germ theories. The danger of dirt is less its direct threat to health but its impact on social status and on the mood of deities, who penalize with misfortune. Cleanliness is crucial for private well-being; public pollution is obsolete. Dissertation. [Subject: South Asian Studies, Sociology]
The 'Bedes' of Bengal
In the Bengali speaking regions of Bangladesh and India, the Bengali term bede today often evokes stereotypical imaginations of itinerant people. Of highly contested origin, the term has in the last two hundred years become the pivotal element for categorising and portraying diverse service nomads of the Bengal region. Besides an analysis of their portrayal in ethnographic and Bengali fictional literature, this book traces causes, reasons, and processes that have led to an increasing perception of these so-called `Bedes' as being ethnically different from the sedentary majority population.
Heritage and Change
The focus of this book is on the first-generation Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Berne, Switzerland. During the Sri Lankan civil war, tens of thousands of Tamil refugees migrated to Switzerland. For decades, they hoped for a return to their desired own state Tamiḻ Īlam and strove to preserve their social ties and home ‘culture’. At the core of their identity was the Tamil language. They essentialized their values as part of the patriotic project of an independent ‘Tamil’ state. Swiss ‘culture’ was seen as incompatible with Tamil ideals. The second generation, socialized in the host country, tended to adopt both ‘cultures’. After the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the end of the war in 2009, the vision of a return to the homeland was shattered. Ten years later the first-generation Swiss Tamils have little desire to return to a country where all their relatives have left or died, and where the situation is seen as unsafe. The elderly Tamils seem prepared to spend their old age in the Swiss exile, the homeland of their children.