Return to search

Moody migrants : the relationship between anxiety, disillusionment, and gendered affect in semi-urban Uttarakhand, India

Recent work in anthropology has translated systemic disjuncture to individual subjectivity, under the premise that "disordered" political economies cause "disordered" identities. However this work underplays the role of affect in "gathering" subjectivity amidst external transformation. The following thesis proposes a concept of "mood" as a set of conjoined, low-level affects that provides continuity in contexts of neoliberalism and change. It investigates women's "moods" in an urbanizing region of Uttarakhand, India. Drawing from ethnographic interviews in a village, and a migrant community, mood is shown to involve components of capitalist anxiety that articulate with attitudes of docility and duty. Experiences typically described as "postmodern" including "incompleteness", "estrangement" and "alienation", are common to, and produce "classical" gendered affects in both rural and urban settings. Although anxiety can be destabilizing, it joins paradoxically with these affects to lubricate women's sense of "belonging" in a place.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.116050
Date January 2008
CreatorsSehdev, Megha.
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Department of Anthropology.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 003164435, proquestno: AAIMR66988, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

Page generated in 0.0018 seconds