In this chapter, we explore multiple constellations of disability to challenge the binary opposition drawn between stasis and mobility, and to document the complex ways in which the two are entangled. We draw on multi-sited fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in coastal South India; Indian Sign Language (ISL)-speaking deaf young adults in urban locations across India; and others identified by themselves or others as disabled in Hyderabad, to document the journeys-for treatment, education, work, and activism-taken by disabled people across their life courses. While these movements should not be conflated with progress, we argue, they do create particular creative opportunities for people to transcend identities and life projects and to forge new ones that are not always open to their nondisabled peers.

Achieving a target of zero-zero disease, zero disability, and zero discrimination-has become the dominant focus of campaigns to control or eliminate diseases, from HIV/AIDS to malaria to leprosy. Given the historical failure of most eradication programs over the last century, such teleological imaginings of disease-free futures might seem overly utopian. But even if it were possible to eradicate such diseases in their entirety, would this be universally welcomed, even by those most affected by them? In this article, I compare the narratives of national and international bodies concerned with eliminating leprosy, in particular, with the more ambivalent narratives of those affected by the disease in India, the country where the disease is most prevalent. For the latter, the promise of elimination not only seems unrealistic, but represents a potential loss of identity. Imagining disease trajectories in less linear terms, I argue, might also nuance understanding of them.

Leprosy, globally recognised as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), is always experienced by those who are diagnosed with it in particular contexts. Although knowledge of cultural specificities – the anthropologist's stock-in-trade – is important in understanding how people in India manage the disease, it is vital, I argue in this chapter, that we also take into account the impact of ideas and actions beyond the local on quotidian experience. At least since the colonial era, the day-to-day lives of people affected by leprosy in India have been shaped by dominant, albeit changing, narratives scripted at different times and places and at multiple scales. This chapter, while working against a binary opposition drawn between the global and the local, explores some of those different narratives and the impact that state, national, and international decisions have had on local knowledge and experience of leprosy.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteEarly View Book and film reviews Blanchette, Alex. Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. 320 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2020. £24.99 (paper) James Staples, James Staples Brunel University LondonSearch for more papers by this author James Staples, James Staples Brunel University LondonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13977Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Rebecca Marsland and James StaplesWe are honored to have this opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the outgoing editor Professor Lenore Manderson, who has contributed more than a decade of wor...

The dominant theoretical frameworks of Disability Studies (DS) have emerged historically in relation both to theoretical trends in the Western academy and to the material circumstances—from industrialization to civil rights movements—of the Global North. At a moment when the continuing hegemony of Western scholarship has led to increasing calls for a decolonization of the curriculum, this article explores the applicability of existing frameworks for studying disability in the South Asian context. It also asks whether culturally specific approaches might be more appropriate and, if so, considers how those might be fruitfully applied without ghettoizing regional DS.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with butchers, cattle traders and beef eaters in South India, the aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it challenges two dominant assumptions made in respect of cattle slaughter and beef consumption in South Asia: one, that the beef trade directly concerns only Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and Christians, and two, that respect for cattle is the near sole preserve of upper-caste Hindus. Secondly, given the strength of the empirical evidence against these two assumptions, it considers how such a stark framing of the debates along caste and communal lines has been sustained so successfully and for so long. Using insights from the anthropology of ignorance-to which this article makes a unique contribution-I argue that part of the answer lies in the strategic acts of not knowing what goes on at particular junctures along the chain from the cowshed to the dinner plate, which a number of different actors are complicit in working to maintain.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad, South India, this article explores the relationship between charity and disability. Despite a stereotype of philanthropic aid as reproductive of existing power structures or symptomatic of state failures to eliminate poverty, closer investigation exposes a more multi-layered picture. Disjunctures in donor and recipient perspectives on charity are shown to create spaces in which recipients might challenge the very characterisations that allow them access to aid in the first place, revealing both the potential and the limitations of charitable aid to bring about social change for disabled people.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 23, Issue 1 p. 207-208 Book and film reviews Snell-Rood, Claire. No one will let her live: women's struggle for well-being in a Delhi slum. xx, 273 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2015. £22.95 (paper) James Staples, James Staples Brunel University LondonSearch for more papers by this author James Staples, James Staples Brunel University LondonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 February 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12568Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume23, Issue1March 2017Pages 207-208 RelatedInformation