Vad kan högskolorna göra för att finansiera forskning i framtiden? Är nya universitet och regionala högskolor beroende av regionala medel för att utveckla forskning ochforskarutbildning? I denna rapport undersöks ett urval högskoleenheter: 1) nya universitet, 2) högskolor som tilldelats vetenskapsområde, samt 3) högskolor som etablerats efter 1996. Sammantaget ingår tre universitet och sju högskolor i undersökningen där finansiering av forskning och forskarutbildning granskas på detaljnivå. Med avseende på forskning och forskarutbildning har högskolorna expanderat snabbt sedan fem år tillbaka. Deras externa forskningsmedel är fortsatt viktiga trots att den statliga direktfinansieringen i flera fall har ökat med 150 procent. Endast 40-45 procent är direkta statliga anslag till forskning och forskarutbildning, vilket jämfört med UoH-sektorn i sin helhet utgör en något lägre andel. Resultaten pekar mot att högskolorna i urvalet i många fall är starkt anknutna till sina regioner. Detta antyds av den höga andelen medel från svenska företag samt från kommuner och landsting. Enligt beräkningarna i rapporten bör drygt tio procent av de totala medlen komma från sådana källor år 2001. Innebörden av detta är att drygt en femtedel av de externa FoU-medlen har någon form av lokal eller regional anknytning. Utöver detta kan noteras att medel från de nya forskningsstiftelserna visar sig vara av stor betydelse och dessa samvarierar i stor utsträckning med de lokala och regionala medlen. Vidare indikerar rapporten att det finns ett starkt samband mellan vetenskapsområde och regional anknytning. De högskolor och universitet som arbetar inom tekniskt vetenskapsområde har en stark och betydande anknytning till regionala forskningsbeställare. Sådan inriktning är samtidigt en konkurrensfördel vad gäller KK-stiftelsens medel. I ett tentativt index som prövas i rapportens andra del konstateras att tre högskoleenheter förtjänar att lyftas fram som framgångsrika i sin regionala samverkan: Mälardalens högskola, Malmö högskola och Karlstads universitet. Dessa har höga andelar FoU-medel från såväl den kommunala sektorn som svenska företag. Rapporten inleds med en problematiserande genomgång som visar att forskning för att vara användbar för företag och kommuner behöver arbeta mot excellens. Internationellt sett starka forskare och forskarmiljöer erbjuder goda samarbetsmöjligheter. Detta fordrar långsiktighet och uthållig forskningsfinansiering. Om de öronmärkta resurser som hittills kanaliserats till nya universitet och högskolor i en framtid kommer att bli mer konkurrensutsatta fordras strategier för att fokusera och koncentrera forskningsmedel. KK-stiftelsens satsningar förefaller ha gått i den riktningen. Frågan är om de regionala forskningsbeställarna kan arbeta i samma riktning?

Migration and re-migration of economically and socially marginalized Ethiopian women and girls has become a phenomenon. Based on interviews with 12 Ethiopian migrant women returned from the Middle East and the Gulf States, the primary aim of this thesis is to describe and study Ethiopian women migrants’ circular migration to the Middle East. I will mainly focus on how social dynamics in the family, gender relations and economic circumstances are intricate. The process of women’s migration and how the expectations of the family can be gender differentiated are discussed. Further, the migrant women’s power relation when class and ethnicity determine their position is discussed. Relations with the sending family and the issues related to the women who return, as well as problems affecting them at home and in the destination countries, are looked at. Various and complex issues of migration and the women’s roles are discussed with reference to the women’s experiences. Migration provides women with opportunities for social and economic mobility but can also subject them to ethnic discrimination, exploitation, and abuse. The movement is generally seen as voluntary labor migration and it has placed them in a vulnerable position both at home and abroad. Their migration is interconnected to the economic need but also the responsibilities they have towards their family and kin.

This article seeks to move beyond the Euro/North-centrism recurrent in methodological discussions on what we may learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. Such debates often centre on uncertainty and involuntary immobility – aspects which are hardly new for many researchers. In this article, we argue that the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink research relations between what we term ‘contracting researchers’ in the Global North and ‘facilitating researchers’ in the Global South. Such relations are often marked by rampant inequalities in remuneration, working conditions, and visibility/authorship. Drawing upon experiences in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, and India, we argue that the pandemic increased the dependence on – and highlighted the invaluable contributions and skills of – facilitating researchers, in part slightly refiguring bargaining power. We also propose pathways for change, arguing for a strong collaborative approach and the need for institutional change, without discarding the responsibilities of individual researchers.

The new "liquid" media environment involves a range of new professions, practices and practitioners (Deuze 2011). Based on a rich ethnographic study containing personal interviews and participant observation, this paper looks at semi-professional Influencers in the social media marketing industry and asks how these new branding professions and their practices emerge and institutionalize. Specifically, the material draws on data collected between 2011 and 2015 among women Influencers in the ‘lifestyle’ genre in Singapore who advertise products and services in the industry verticals of Fashion, Beauty, and Electronic goods on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram.

This essay describes the phases of funeral rituals between the Syrian/Assyrian, and compares the homeland with Sweden. It describes the stage of rituals according to Victor Turner schema of separation, margin or limin, and aggregation. The rituals religious significance agrees with Clifford Geertz’s theory about the importance of religious beliefs for the human being

For centuries livestock have formed the backbone of the Somali economy. Camels are especially highly valued by Somali herdsmen.

The practical uses of the camel have been eloquently described by Somalis in their extensive oral poetry, handed down through generations from father to son. It forms a complete literacy tradition composed of poems, proverbs, metaphors and tales of wisdom.

The collection and preservation of Somali oral literature are important subjects that require urgent attention. This rich literature was transmitted to us orally from generation to generation. The cultural and historical life of the Somali people is reflected in this ancient oral data.

The present collection of oral literature on the Somali camel is the result of an extensive research work. Oral literature has been one of the subjects studied by the "Somali camel research project", a bilateral undertaking between Somalia and Sweden (the Somali Academy of Sciences and Arts, SOMAC, and the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries, SAREC).

Sea nomads or 'sea people,' namely the 'Bajau Laut' in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are skilled divers, and many Bajau Laut make a living from freediving. Men do most of the spearfishing, but women also dive, predominantly for gathering sea food. They start to dive at an early age and spend most days of their lives on and in the sea. Our objective was to study their diving and way of life, to reveal if modern humans have the physiological potential for making a living from breath-hold diving for fishing and gathering. Bajau Laut were visited for a total of nine months, during three periods from 2010-2013, in a combined physiological and social-Anthropological study. The diving physiology studies focused on a total of 10 male divers, whose working day diving while spearfishing was logged with time-depth loggers. One group of 5 divers were engaged in shallow (5-7 m) spearfishing with an underwater working time of 60%, when diving for 2-9 h. The other group of 5 divers went to a mean depth of 10 m and had an underwater working time of 50%, when diving for 3-9 h per day. During that time, between one and eight kilograms of coral fish, blow fish, moray eels and octopuses were caught, per diver. Seafood collected by the women included clams, crustaceans, sea weed and sea cucumbers. Life among the Bajau Laut was much like it was 25 years ago, although in some areas the fish stock is diminishing, making it necessary for the Bajau Laut to spend more time in the water to obtain the same quantity of fish. It was concluded that modern humans do possess the physiological qualities necessary for making a living from hunting-gathering via breath-hold diving.

This article contains the text and discussion of a debate held at the IUAES World Congress in Anthropology at Manchester University in 2013. The motion was proposed by Bela Feldman-Bianco (State University of Campinas), seconded by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven) and was opposed by Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), seconded by Nicholas de Genova (then at Goldsmiths' College). The debate was chaired by Simone Abram (Durham University).

In the time period 2012–2013, over 20 national elections and two constitutional referendums are scheduled in Africa. In several of these elections, violence is anticipated to play a prominent role. There is great urgency to support the establishment of effective and legitimate electoral institutions and electoral frameworks; institute reforms aimed at lowering the stakes of elections; encourage the devolution of powers; improve the socio-economic standing of the populace; and devise strategies to prevent and manage electoral violence.

Ethnology is a disciplinary field that is more or less interwoven with anthropology. Its main focus is the analysis of various cultures and cultural expressions, usually within a national context. In practice, ethnologists favor an approach toward culture from the individual perspective, with a key interest in how single ordinary individuals, seen as active cultural beings, think and act in their everyday lives. This implies that they are both shaped by and contributors to the shaping of cultures in their everyday lives. However, within ethnology, culture viewed as a bidirectional phenomenon is not merely regarded as an individual process. Rather, it is regarded as something that occurs in collective social contexts. When analyzing culture, ethnologists usually employ a combined focus on its ideational and folkloric aspects as well as aspects of materiality, locality, and identity. Ethnology's general methodological approaches comprise ethnographic fieldwork as well as studies of artifacts and sociocultural structures.

Ethnology is a disciplinary field that is more or less interwoven with anthropology. Its main focus is the analysis of various cultures and cultural expressions, usually within a national context. In practice, ethnologists favor an approach toward culture from the individual perspective, with a key interest in how single ordinary individuals, seen as active cultural beings, think and act in their everyday lives. This implies that they are both shaped by and contributors to the shaping of cultures in their everyday lives. However, within ethnology, culture viewed as a bidirectional phenomenon is not merely regarded as an individual process. Rather, it is regarded as something that occurs in collective social contexts. When analyzing culture, ethnologists usually employ a combined focus on its ideational and folkloric aspects as well as aspects of materiality, locality, and identity. Ethnology's general methodological approaches comprise ethnographic fieldwork as well as studies of artifacts and sociocultural structures.

This thesis focuses on the dynamics of care in the transnational lives of Ecuadorian migrant women in Spain. It is concerned with the various forms of care that take shape and are sustained in the workplace, between friends, and among family members in Ecuador and Spain. Ultimately, it sheds light on how care is mobilised to sustain ideals of solidarity at work as well as togetherness in transnational life. The thesis is set against the background of the economic and political crisis in Ecuador of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which resulted not only in the dollarization of the economy and the removal of the country’s president, but in a dramatic shift of traditional male migration from the southern highlands to the United States, to a new wave of largely middle class female migration to Western Europe, especially Spain. Women from across the country left their children, spouses and elderly parents behind to work in domestic and care jobs abroad. In Ecuador, this disturbed the dominant cultural imaginary of the co-habitating and united family, centred on the presence of the woman as mother and wife. In light of this, the thesis engages with women’s dilemmas in giving and receiving care during years of absence, the role of family members, friends and domestic workers in this process, and the development of long-term goals focused on remittances, reunification, return, and the ultimate goal of creating a better future. Most generally, while challenging a series of dichotomies between love and money, home and work, gift and commodity—which have structured academic discussions concerning the feminization of international migration—the thesis describes the intimate relationship between women’s participation in the gift economy and a global labour market through the lens of care relationships.

In the last five years, alien lionfish, pufferfish, rabbitfish and sea urchins have proliferated in southern Crete. They are part of the 600 alien marine species that have entered the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Vibrant imperial debris and afterlives of global shipping, the tropical fishes are transforming ecologies across the sea. In this presentation, I delve into feelings of hope and despair when it comes to these processes. I conceptualize my interlocutors’ apocalyptic mindset and its concomitant ethics (which alarmingly is reflected in current biodiversity agendas) as a form of ‘cruel environmentalism’ to zoom into two rather different forms of cruelty. First, this mindset relies on necropolitics, advocating the killing of migrant species to save native ecologies. In this case, the solution to goes via the belly and 'invasivorism', i.e. the devouring of invasive species. Awareness campaigns inform consumers to “eat responsibly” by putting aliens on the menu. Marine biologists underline that endemic fishes need to cultivate a taste for alien inhabitants, turning invasivorism into a multispecies ‘responsibility.’ Second, this environmentalism is a form of ‘cruel optimism’ because of its futility. At its core, Laurent Berland (2011) explains, a psychological or emotional attachment is cruel when your desire (or the object of your desire) turns into an obstacle for your flourishing. The seascapes my interlocutors yearn for and seek to protect are not only landscapes of the past, they are idealized frozen memories of ecologies that only existed for a sliver of time (Kirsey 2015).

In 2008, Egyptian newspapers reported eight members of a family dead after consuming a meal of seafood (Ali 2008) in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Located on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and home to one of Egypt’s largest fishing ports, Alexandria is famous for its many seafood markets and restaurants. Everyone visits Alexandria to eat fish and so in this regard, the family did nothing out of the ordinary. But the tragedy was bewildering. A sea creature of such poisonous potency was not to be found in the sea; if it were, it would be well-known and infamous. After centuries of cohabitation with the sea and fish consumption, fishermen and fishmongers know which fish are tasty and edible and, indeed, which fish are poisonous and potentially lethal. Was it some kind of sea monster? The culprit was a bulky silver-dotted pufferfish (Lagocephalus sceleratus), an alien species and newcomer to this part of the world. Native to the Indian Ocean, the pufferfish is only one of over 600 species that have drifted north through the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. More will come. While the Suez Canal has been open for some 150 years, it is only in the last decades, due to dredging and enlargement of the passageway, that the influx of species is changing Mediterranean marine worlds fundamentally. New species keep on appearing, old species perish. In this roundtable, I will talk about cultural memories and current affects among people living with a sea that is changing beyond recognition. Based on research in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, it dwells on people’s shifting relation to the Sea, people who are witnesses and adjusting to one of the world’s largest species transformations.

This paper outlines how the concept stagecraft emerged as a productive analytic to understand the intricate politics of tourism capitalism, image curation, and rule by appearances during Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. This governance mimicked the logic of the tourism business and the industry’s dependence on appearance, images and imaginaries. Cultural heritage and tourism have long permeated Egyptian nation-building (Colla 2007), but only in the 1990s did tourism become an industry of economic importance on a mass scale: international arrivals went from two million visitors to fifteen;revenues from U.S. $380 million to 6.4 billion. Scholars have analyzed the conditions of this expansion (Hazbun 2007, Steiner 2010). My doctoral research, based on extensive fieldwork with tourist bureaucrats, marketing experts, and tourist workers in 2011-2013, instead turns attention to its effects: What influence did the tourism sector assert on power and statecraft in Egypt during the Mubarak era? What types of politics did it enable? What actions and visions did it foster among state actors and ordinary people? My findings suggest that by 2010, tourism was not only a successful business; it had become an integral mode of a kind of governance that mimicked the logic of the industry itself. The paper details how stagecraft through tourism worked at different levels. The ever-growing bank of romantic and stylized tourist images were employed as a means to promote particular visions of the regime, the nation and its future. The Red Sea resorts and the hosting of high-profile diplomatic meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh staged a liberal, wealthy and beautiful version of the country for Western audiences. Simultaneously, tourism provided opportunities for increased state control in previously peripheral regions (Sinai, the northern coast and the oases). I also show how the tourist gaze became a predominant mode of imagining the nation and ruling the citizens. Images of "touristy Egypt" resonated among the population, because it concretized the country's “potential” beyond present misrule. Tourism awareness campaigns further solicited citizens to curate the image of Egypt in front of the world, displaying certain sides (monuments, the Egyptian Museum and beaches) and hiding others (poverty, misrule and pollution). In 2011, tourism was Egypt’s outward face. The future looked bright. But the revolution would destroy the scene of Mubarak’s stagecraft. But his fall also marked the end of rule by appearance. Since then, audacity, boldness and post-truth have taken over the stage.

This first presentation introduces the themes and conceptualisation of the panel. 

If anthropology were to burn, the sea is already on fire. Due to warming water, oceans are experiencing mass exodus of marine life and species “out of place.” While mobile species and migrant humans claim rights to belong elsewhere via the ocean, states, corporations, and environmental organizations lay their own claims: as a space of movement, capital accumulation, extractivism, and sea-grabbing, the sea becomes the front stage for new forms of expansion, control and bordering practices. Focusing on disparate movements currently unfolding in our oceans: human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations, this panel traces nativist, capitalist and colonial legacies in anthropology and beyond.

Approached as archives of the past, oceanscapes and sealives provide new stories about the world we inherited from the colonial era. Through this colonial framework, early anthropology was dominated by a terracentric and anthropocentric gaze, viewing humans and non-humans as sedentary subjects. While the 1990s “mobility turn” challenged this paradigm when it came to humans, oceans continued to be treated as transit spaces, not as social worlds made up by moving people and sea creatures. Water cannot easily be fenced, owned, territorialized or captured. A focus on attempts to regulate and control the sea, mobilites and resources through governance or ocean grabs teaches us how the logics of capture and control underpinning colonialism and capitalism have been premised on the qualities of land, and are being rescripted for the element of water.

No time to waste. The predicaments of the third-tier academic track are daunting: a heavy teaching-load as you get the classes no one else wants to teach, expectations to teach already designed courses with little introduction as to the logic behind the curriculums, and little possibility to influence literature lists or courses since short-term employees are not part of the departmental board. You are expected to behave like a teaching-machine. exceeds the stated hours in your contract, the teaching-gig ends up eating up the precious time that you have for publications and research applications. And it really doesn’t matter, because you spend most of your hours on cumbersome job applications that have inflated in absurdum: how did we end up in a system where a job application can take up to a week to prepare?

The third-tier precarious academic could be understood as the ultimate hustler from the university underground as they navigate these conditions. But why don’t precarious academics revolt or give up? That is the most puzzling question, given that a permanent position still entails significant workload and a pay that is lower compared to the private sector. Improvisation hinges upon imagination and creativity. Overwork, overstress and exhaustion severely undermine the capacities for imaginative play and thinking outside the box; and so does being a teaching machine. Has our imagination been stifled to such a degree that we only improvise and hustle within the limited frames of the iron tower? 

This talk thinks through multispecies invasivorism (eating invasive species) and the politics of eating in the context of alien marine species in the waters of Crete. In the last five years, alien lionfish, pufferfish, rabbitfish and sea urchins have proliferated in southern Crete. They are part of the 600 Lessepsian species, i.e. alien marine species entering the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal, which are now transforming local marine ecologies. Why these changes are unfolding now, 150 years after the opening of the canal, is a complex story of entangled human, biological and geological processes. My current research project explores the unruly environmental afterlife of the Suez Canal on land and under the surface through ethnographic work with humans and fishes across the Eastern Mediterranean Basin. 

In Crete, invasivorism is increasingly being advocated as a solution for controlling alien populations in the future. Awareness campaigns inform people to “eat responsibly” by putting aliens on the menu. But invasivorism extends beyond human appetites. Marine biologists underline the need for endemic fishes to cultivate a taste for alien inhabitants. This is challenging. Fishes’ learning processes are little-known and local species have highly specialized feeding habits. In contrast to their distinguished taste, alien species are understood to undermine the food chain by “eat everything: juveniles, fishermen’s catch and each other.” Is their unsatisfiable appetite crude cannibalism or diligent invasivorism? To disentangle the meanings and politics assigned to more-than-human eating in this case, I think through concepts like distinction, gluttony, food chains and belonging.

This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers' approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives.

In Finland, a great distance away from Buenos Aires, people crowd dance floors nightly to dance to tango music, while the tango has also captured the hearts of the people on the other side of the world in Japan. The popularity of the tango in both Finland and Japan, however, is not so familiar to the outside world.

In this paper, I will discuss the motives and the paths by which a culture travels, settles and shapes itself into a new form, using the tango as an example. First, the tango’s relationship to society and history in each of these countries are explored using archives and literature. Then such aspects as inner emotion, solitude, illusion, and liminality are analyzed through data collected from surveys, interviews, and forum discussions in the SNS.

Some scholars suggest that the tango reflects the personality, mentality, and identity of the Finnish and Japanese peoples. Though this may be partially true, it is difficult to generalize about the Finnish or Japanese personality. It is argued, rather, that the tango's prosperity in these two countries has significant connections to some shared historical and social factors. I also propose that the 'liminality' of tango dancing plays an important role in both nations that went through difficult struggles to recover from the damage caused by war. “The liminal phase is considered sacred, anomalous, abnormal and dangerous, while the pre- and post-liminal phases are normal and a profane state of being” (Selänniemi 1996). Tango dancing can be considered an escape or a vacation from the hardship of everyday life as well as a fuel which enables the people to keep moving forward.

The tango’s transformation in Finland and Japan, and its homecoming back to Argentina are also examined. The results reveal some of the unusual paths a culture can travel.

Since the second half of the 20th century the Philippines have supplied the world with migrant workers. Today, almost one tenth of the population is residing abroad. Labour migration has become an important source of revenue to both state and private actors through remittances, for the Philippines, and a source of cheap labour battling labour shortage, in the receiving countries. Today, the global labour market is a distinct and important part of what we call globalisation. This is portrayed in this thesis through the lens of Philippine-Korean labour migration.

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the emergence of migrants as a commodity for export, the institutionalised creation of migrants, the normalisation of labour migration, and containment of migrants through legal and spatial constraints, in Manila and in Seoul.

This thesis look at the ways in which labour migration, as an economic policy, is internalised and transformed into a culture of migration. I argue that the effects of a culture of migration is felt not just by the labour migrants themselves, but also by their families and by the Philippines as a whole. As such, the reliance on remittances as a source of income has transformed domestic and global infrastructures as well as norms and social behaviour. Moreover, this thesis aims to add to the discussion on migration and remittances by exploring social dimensions and consequences of the globalisation of the labour market.

Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis.

'The un/selfish' leader explores notions of selfishness, as they were perceived by people in the village of Ekkaraiyur, Tamil Nadu, India, at a time they associated with thorough changes in their lives.

Discussing locally held notions about agrarian change, seen as causing the erosion of earlier village loyalties and leading to the emergence of a new type of leaders, the study focus on the censure of the alleged corruption of these leaders. Expressed in a rich repertoire of stories about the ideals of leadership and about the excellence of the past and foreign societies, the censure was routinely voiced in public debates and in everyday conversations.

Set against a background an increasing role of the state for the people in Ekkaraiyur, the censure of leaders implied a critique of the contemporary society they were taken to represent. Moreover, the study argues that the critique was grounded in evaluations of individualism and selfishness in human nature.

The study is based on fieldwork carried out in Ekkaraiyur between 1988 and 1990

'The un/selfish' leader explores notions of selfishness, as they were perceived by people in the village of Ekkaraiyur, Tamil Nadu, India, at a time they associated with thorough changes in their lives.

Discussing locally held notions about agrarian change, seen as causing the erosion of earlier village loyalties and leading to the emergence of a new type of leaders, the study focus on the censure of the alleged corruption of these leaders. Expressed in a rich repertoire of stories about the ideals of leadership and about the excellence of the past and foreign societies, the censure was routinely voiced in public debates and in everyday conversations.

Set against a background an increasing role of the state for the people in Ekkaraiyur, the censure of leaders implied a critique of the contemporary society they were taken to represent. Moreover, the study argues that the critique was grounded in evaluations of individualism and selfishness in human nature.

The study is based on fieldwork carried out in Ekkaraiyur between 1988 and 1990