New Book, Youngblood, Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization

I am pleased to announce the publication of my book which may be of interest,
Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization.
The book is a winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' Joseph W. Elder Book Prize.
Cultivating Community is based on my two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential rural social movement in India's Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and collective identity in the context of the movement, and ways these are constructed, in part, through evocative symbols and idioms of regional folk culture.
The Shetkari Sanghatana, formed in the late 1980s and continuing today, has a very broad base of support. It mobilizes participants from a wide cross-section of rural castes and classes across a state comprising 300,000 square kilometers. It’s central demand is for the end of government economic intervention in agriculture—the key to a future that leaders and participants describe as the restoration of a golden age of rural rule under a mythological demon king named Bali. In the book, I argue for a participant-centric view of the Shetkari Sanghatana, digging beneath the movement’s fantastical mythological idiom and the overarching demands that we hear articulated by leadership to see how the Sanghatana is experienced and constructed by individual participants on the ground. An important part of my analysis focuses on ways that participants and leaders together deploy a pool of locally shared but highly ambiguous spiritual and political symbols in an ongoing competition to define what the movement stands for, whose interests it represents, and what the future should look like. This is an anthropological ethnography that delves considerably into the power and significance of folklore in contemporary politics.
Details
Page Count: 324 pages
Publisher: South Asian Studies Association (November 7, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0983447276
ISBN-13: 978-0983447276
For further information, see
https://www.amazon.com/Cultivating-Community-Interest-Ambiguity-Mobilization/dp/0983447276/
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Interests and identity in a mass movement
            The Sanghatana in brief
            Progressive solidification in the literature
            The fragmented and integrated village
            From interpretive community to dialogical community
            Fieldwork: Bali’s kingdom and its subjects
            A note on typologies, and the chapters ahead
Chapter 2: Contours of community and place
            Maharashtrian contours
            Signifying mass identity in Maharashtra
            Conclusions
Chapter 3: The field of signs
            “Price” and economic rationality in the experiential field
            Communicating experiential intersections through Maharashtrian signs
            Expanding the context of shared experience
            Conclusions
Chapter 4: Dialogics of interest and identity
            Peeling the onion of the single-issue movement
            Distributed objectives and shifting participation
            Sanghatanas and sanghataks: Dialogical crafting of agency
            Conclusions
Chapter 5: Bali will rise: Dialogics of interest and identity, continued
            Bali as a Maharashtrian sign of subalternity
            Bali’s realm and his fall from rule
            The lived context of Puranic worldview in Maharashtra
            Bali veneration in the context of the movement
            Reconsidering Sharad Joshi as the demon king
            Conclusions
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Cultivating communities
            Participation and participants
            Movement narratives and ideological frames
            Leaders and leadership