Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I am struck by the adulatory remarks in the major news outlets in India celebrating Bal Thackeray, remarking upon his sense of humor, his penchant for art and poetry, and his role as a political leader that united Maharashtra and gave a sense of national identity for its citizens. These adulations are completely uncritical, rewriting the story of a leader who often referred to Hindu sentiments to inspire violence and hatred. From watching and hearing all the praises, you would not know that this is the very demagogue who had inspired a generation of Hindu right wing fanatics, writing the script of a Maratha Hindu state. You would not know that inspired by Hitler, this was the leader who appealed to the politics of Hindu identity to call for massacres, erasures, and mass scale violence. What becomes most apparent in the storying of Mr. Thackeray's legacy is the fundamental paradox of neoliberal organizing of India. This is the essential paradox between a penchant for a na

Today, CARE Fellow Kang Sun presented part of his dissertation work on identity, space, and materiality among Chinese peasant workers in manufacturing units. It was a stimulating CARE presentation, one that opened up the discursive space for multiple questions regarding the role of identity at the intersections of the symbolic and the material. Kang is a master storyteller, one who draws you into his stories by connecting to his personal experiences. As he re-crafted the many stories that he has partaken in during his fieldwork, what I found striking about his stories was the amazing connection between stories and the need to draw attention to injustices. Stories became ways for giving voice to certain forms of injustices. It was through the many stories that Kang weaved along with his participants that we got to listen to the possibilities of change. The many stories planted in our hearts and spirits the seeds of hope and the ideas for possibilities. I came away enthused

In one of our earlier conversations on politics of social change, JT had noted how so much of the Indian left is occupied by Brahminized subjects who come from positions of privilege, having secured access to positions of leadership (intellectual or political) through access to instruments of education, the metropole, and the elite circles that operate in the metropole. The Tam Brahms, Bong Brahms, and North Indian Brahms that occupy these elite positions often come from positions of privilege, having been born into families with privilege and access, and having been educated into the norms of civility and participation. Their theorizing of Marx or Lenin or Engels therefore is borne out from these positions of privilege, often played out in easy access to resources and tools of learning. What then are the implications for Left politics and/or politics of social change when the discursive sites of articulation are themselves occupied by a Brahminized class that replicates privilege

Whether you look at feudal, communist, or capitalist systems, a seamless link that runs among the practices of these various forms of governing is the power held by networks of the power elite, and the transference of power within kinship ties. The power elite continue their rule over generations not simply by coercion but by manufacturing systems, processes, and strategies that work to propagate their power. This inbuilt power enables the movement of their future generations into the structures of power. This inter-generational transfer of power works both communicatively and materially, being symbolically perpetuated through the rules, tools, and requirements of entry into symbolic spaces of privilege. The effectiveness of the power elite in ruling spaces is precisely tied to the access of the power elite to resources through which they can perpetuate their power and control. The dominance of the power elite plays out across generations, ascertaining specific forms of entry

My talk in CNM titled "Returning the White Man's gaze: Reimagining social science research" generated some amazing conversations with my colleagues, who pushed me further through their questions to imagine what a politics of change might look like that works through a project of decolonization. One of the questions raised and that stayed with me was, "What about Third World oppressions that are carried out by indigenous subjects on other indigenous subjects?" Working out a politics of change from the Third is a dance of hope and hopelessness as Ambar Basu so eloquently writes about in his work with sex workers in the SHIP project in Sonagachi. You see, resisting the colonial gaze has to be the starting point in a poltics of social change as much of the inequities at the structural level are embedded within the Eurocentric logic and the foregrounding of Euro-centered rationality that privileges private property owning subjects as participants in the public

Part I: Running Saviors  Humanitarianism is a troubling idea. If we are to believe Adorno, it exists primarily on the idea that the object of humanitarian intervention is outside of rationality (enlightenment), and must be brought under the realm of the sensible through the humanitarian gaze: to look at the other and firmly believe that they "deserve to be treated as are humans." At some point, humanitarian logic has been neatly entwined with the liberal logic: in that acts of humanitarianism are always associated with some kind of consumptive gestures. From Project [RED] T-shirts, Livestrong bands (quite another story, there), and Starbucks lattes that alleviate part of one's late capitalist guilt with each sip through the donation of x percent of the proceeds to "farmers in Africa", the relationship between consumption and humanitarian logic holds fast. Ending TB epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing AIDS drugs to sex workers in Cambodia, and help

In the two year sentencing accorded to Rajat Gupta on October 24, 2012, the judge Jed Rakoff noted  “He [Rajat Gupta] is a good man,… But the history of this country and the history of the world are full of examples of good men who did bad things.” The stories of the trial point to the large number of character certificates that had poured in for Gupta, citing his global track records and his history of doing good deeds. Rajat Gupta and his global networks News reports documented the broader context, setting up the case for the character of Mr. Gupta. It seems that the news reports much like judge Rakoff operate on a worldview that differentiates between between good and bad on the basis of the logics of power. The very discussion of whether Gupta is a good man or not enters into the discursive space because of his networks of power and because of his ability to manipulate these networks to achieve specific goals. That Bill Gates writes in letters to the judge attests to t

In your language I learned to see the world And imagine it. In your language I learned to share my thoughts And pen my opinions. In your language I learned to hear the stories Of your conquests. In your language I learned to witness The tales of your tyranny. In your language I learned to unlearn The hypocrisies of your freedom songs. In your language I learned your history of lynchings and slavery. In your language I learned about you And your lies.

You see, in CCA work, as we discuss how we capture and narrativize what we experience in the field, we discuss the notion of bounded narratives. Bounded narratives are drawn upon the notion that the stories that we tell our audiences are always displaced, always incomplete, always removed from the experience. How then does the storyteller live with the ethical implications of these incomplete stories? How does one live with the knowledge that the story I tell today of an experience is not the experience itself, but some representation of the experience constituted at the moment of writing? Writing then is an act of re-creating some version of the experience at the moment...here...now. My recollection of the many hours of wait after the surgery is one that is filled with uncertainty. Baba was unconscious the day after. When we would go in to see him, talk to him, he would not respond back. He seemed like he had crawled into a space deep inside. A space inside himself. I almost

A subarachnoid heamorrhage is described as the accumulation of blood in the area between the brain and the thin tissue covering the brain, referred to as the subarachnoid space. The usual sympton of a subarachnoid heamorrhage is a severe headache, often described by patients as the "worst headache ever." When I had arrived home, baba's head was hurting severely and he was finding it dificult to keep his eyes open. He also was vomiting a great deal, another sign of a subarachnoid heamorrhage. In the high dependency ward, his consciousness was gradually dopping. He was in deep pain, and after a lot of pushing and pulling, would respond to questions. Gradually, this response level started sinking further and further, with him rarely opening his eyes, and rarely being able to respond to stimuli except to pain stimuli. He was supported by a team of junior and trainee doctors. The doctors took the time to explain to us in detail the different steps of the diagnosis

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE A Cross-Sectional Survey of Public Opinion toward the Affordable Care Act in Indiana CARE White Paper Series, 2012 Volume 1 Indiana Minority Health Coalition, Inc. 3737 North Meridian Street, Suite 300 Indianapolis, Indiana 46208 317-926-4011 www.imhc.org Contact: Troy Julian Gibson, Media Liaison troyjulian@gmail.com 317-797-7216 Indianapolis, IN, Thursday, August 9, 2012 – The Indiana Minority Health Coalition (IMHC) cordially invites you to attend the public release of the results of A Cross-Sectional Survey of Public Opinion toward the Affordable Care Act in Indiana. A study conducted by the Center for Culture-Center Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at the National University of Singapore. The study was funded through an award to Purdue University by the Indiana Minority Health Coalition. In 2010, Indiana was among the leading states to incorporate aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This study was conducted