Among liberal thinkers, there is an optimistic belief that men and women are on a cultural journey toward equality – in the workplace, on the street, and in the home. But observation and evidence both tell us that in many ways this progress has stopp...

The Roma or Romani people, commonly called gypsies, comprise one of the largest ethnic minorities in the European Union, with significant populations in the Balkan Peninsula as well as Spain, France, Russia, and the Ukraine. Persecution of the Roma d...

In her book "In a Different Voice", psychologist Carol Gilligan proffered the controversial idea that a psychology of male development could not suffice as a psychology of all human development, both male and female. Since the publication of that rev...

"Guilty Males and Proud Females" is the first complete study on the Bengali gajan festival dedicated to Dharmaraj, a village god in the Rarh region of Bengal. The gajan is the dramatic representation of an hierogamy – the marriage of a god and goddes...

In "Rebels, Wives, Saints", acclaimed scholar Tanika Sarkar continues her revolutionary scholarship on women, religion, and nationhood in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe Sarkar describes in "Rebels, Wives, Saints" centers around symbols of wom...

Anthropology and sociology have long histories in India. Yet, with the exception of fieldwork experience, there is little research available on the institutional and material contexts of these disciplines or on the practices of pioneering anthropolog...

Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was th...

From the late eighteenth century, Calcutta, first city of the British empire, has been a hub of intersecting ideas and movements of change. Nowhere did the restless currents of history play themselves out more graphically than in the composite art of...

A flamboyantly eclectic anthology that explodes the myths about the lines which divide us – the heterosexual from the homosexual, the normative from the "alternative", the phobic from the obsessive, the moral from the titillating, the academic from t...

"Following into death" is an ancient and widespread custom which entails one or more people – voluntarily or involuntarily – following a dead man or woman into death. The event is ritualized as a public act. The decisive feature is not the manner of...