Academic literature on the topic 'Gujarat (India) Social life and customs'

With the increasing number of women entering the labour force internationally, the role of women is changing. Consequently, researchers are pressed to investigate how females of all cultures balance their work and family responsibilities. Amongst Hindu couples, this issue can either be a source of tension or positive support. An overview of literature indicates that the psychological aspects of dual-career Hindu women have received little attention in South Africa. The current study aimed to explore and describe coping resources and the subjective well-being of full-time employed Hindu mothers. The study took the form of a non-experimental exploratory-descriptive design. Participants were selected through nonprobability convenience sampling. The sample of the study consisted of sixty full-time employed Hindu mothers between the ages of 25 and 45 years of age who had at least one dependent primary school child aged between 7 to 12 years. Various questionnaires were used to collect data for this study. These included a Biographical Questionnaire, The Coping Resources Inventory (CRI), The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and The Affectometer 2 (AFM2). Data was analysed by means of descriptive statistics. Cronbach’s coefficient alphas were utilised to calculate the reliability of the scores of each questionnaire. A multivariate technique was used to determine the amount of clusters formed. A non-hierarchical partitioning technique known as K-means cluster analysis was utilised in this study. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilised in order to compare the mean scores of the various clusters. A post-hoc analysis using the Scheffé test was computed to test for significant differences. Cohen’s d statistics was subsequently used to determine the practical significance of the differences found between the cluster means on each of the measures. The cluster analysis indicated three clusters that differed significantly from one another on all three measures. The results of the CRI indicated that the participants used cognitive and spiritual resources to assist them to cope with the transition from traditional to modern contemporary roles. It was also found that the participants with low coping resources had inferior subjective well-being compared to those who had average and high CRI scores. The findings indicated that the participants were generally satisfied with their lives and experienced high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect. However, as a group there was a trend for the participants to have experienced slightly lower levels of global happiness or slightly negative affect. The results of this study broadens the knowledge base of positive psychology with respect to the diverse cultures and gender roles within South Africa. Overall, this study highlighted the value and the need for South African research on the coping resources and subjective well-being of dual-career Hindu mothers.

Social protection should ideally create a framework of 'welfare rights' for the vulnerable individuals and households. The state, through a set of policies of promotive and protective measures, sets out to achieve this. However, gaining these welfare rights in a decentralised democratic framework could be a function of the bargaining power that each individual, household and social group may possess. Therefore the micro-level interactions involving claimant, bureaucrat and local elites constitute the key policy process. Study of the process itself can reveal why some households gain formal social protection and other fail. This study argues that the local practices and informal rules underlying these public policy processes are purposively guided by the private interests of the local elites. At the heart of this dissertation is a comparative case-study of two villages in the Indian state of Maharashtra, based on eight months ethnographic fieldwork. Bottomup evaluation of two social protection programmes, public works (promotive) and social assistance (protective) programmes shows that 60 per cent of eligible persons are excluded from welfare rights. The mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in these programmes are studied. The study reveals that both eligibility and entitlement to 'welfare rights' are contested within the power structure of the local community. The social identity of the claimant, and the ability to build a relationship with the local leaders or labour market managers act as key routes to access welfare rights. The precedence of informal rules at the stage of implementation of social protection programmes reproduced the existing social and economic power structures. As a result, the welfare rights of individuals and households are affected by the competing forces in the non-state sectors. These non-state actors, through their network, were able to weaken the administration and fair allocation of welfare benefits. Through this analysis the thesis contributes to the understanding of the local state, and decision-making practices over welfare rights in a decentralised context.

This paper presents a conceptual framework of important cultural values, activity patterns and environmental patterns in the home environment of a typical middle-income family in Madras a South Indian City. The position of this paper is that cultural variables should play an important part in determining the form of housing; they should be explicitly accounted for and values should be related to the different components of the built environment. This framework is intended to serve as a guide suggesting programmatic criteria for design of culturally-responsive housing. As it relates abstract values to components of the built environment, and design patterns, the framework includes descriptive graphics and images.The main body of the framework is a summary of societal and activity patterns, and elements of design. A descriptive analysis of societal and family patterns looks at the interactions between society, family and the individual. Activity patterns in and around the home with their symbolic associations are examined in detail. Implications for the home environment are drawn from the observations made in these sections. This is followed by a look at the elements of design that have been manipulated in existing house forms to create culturally appropriate environments.The concluding part of the framework presents a way in which the earlier observations can be assimilated into the design process. A sample set of environmental patterns are presented using images, with their cultural purpose, design descriptions and variants. This is followed by a matrix where family types, individual roles and activities are related to the environmental qualities and in some cases to sample environmental patterns.The research involved anthropological studies for an understanding of the cultural elements like family and kinship structure, myths and beliefs, values and priorities, etc., in the Indian context. Analysis of changing house forms in response to social and cultural changes in history, and designs of culture sensitive architects, helped to identify the environmental components that relate to specific values. Christopher Alexander's idea of `patterns' was used as a tool to translate abstract cultural criteria into recognizable environmental settings.<br>Department of Architecture

This doctoral thesis explores the entanglement of religion and identity politics in the Indo-Burma borderlands and the indigenisation of Christianity there through grassroots processes of cultural revivalism. The ethnographic focus is on the Sumi Naga from the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. While the Sumi started converting to Baptist Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century, conversion rates accelerated especially in the 1950s and again in the 1970s when two evangelical revivals swept across the lands of the Sumi and resulted in their conversion en masse. Significantly, these Great Revivals coincided in time with the most turbulent political history of this borderland region, as the Sumi, alongside all other Naga, were waging an armed struggle against the Indian nation-state for their right to self-determination and independence. While this struggle is now largely being fought with political rather than military means, it remains ideologically motivated by Naga perceptions of their distinct ethnic identity, history and culture compared to the rest of India. Baptist Christianity has played a central role in shaping and sustaining these perceptions. Over the past several decades following the Second Great Revival in the 1970s there has been a movement from within Sumi society to reconstruct and redefine their identity by drawing heavily on both their contemporary religion (Baptist Christianity) and their 'good' pre-Christian culture, which had been demonised and rejected in the course of earlier conversions. Discourses have been circulating in public space on the urgent need to reconceptualise collective Sumi identity by reviving, or preserving, those aspects of pre-Christian Sumi culture that are perceived as 'good' and constitutive of Sumi-ness but are currently 'under threat' of being gradually lost to modernity and foreign influences. These discourses are directly linked to processes of cultural revivalism across Nagaland, which have been motivated by a sense of the perceived loss of 'good' cultural heritage and cultural roots. This thesis is an ethnographic study of these processes of identity (re)construction within a Sumi Naga community. It sets out to examine the ways in which Baptist Christianity is central to everyday life in a Sumi village and how it plays an important role in forging group cohesion and solidarity through ritual practice and various forms of fellowship. The thesis then proceeds to study the phenomenon of cultural revivalism in both its discursive and practical manifestations. The thesis argues that the cultural revival has not reduced the centrality of Baptist Christianity to Sumi self-ascriptions and perceptions of identity, but is rather thought to have enriched it and given it a stronger cultural foundation. Hence, a Sumi Naga Christianity is being created which is perceived as unique, indigenous and distinct in its own right. The thesis attempts to explore the essence of this vernacular Christianity against the backdrop of its specific historical, economic, political and spiritual context and the all-encompassing Naga struggle against the Indian nation-state. In pursuing these issues, the thesis locates itself within debates on the intersection between religion and identity politics, which prevail in many contemporary contributions to the anthropology of Christianity.

The sustained interaction of local elites and British administrators in the West Himalayas over the decades that surrounded the early colonial encounter (c. 1790-1840) saw the emergence of a distinctly new understanding of communal identity among the leaders of the region. This eventful period saw the mountain ('Pahari') kingdoms transform from fragmented, autonomous polities on the fringes of the Indian subcontinent to subjects of indigenous (Nepali, Sikh) and, ultimately, foreign (British) empires, and dramatically altered the ways Pahari leaders chose to remember and represent themselves. Using a wide array of sources from different locales in the hills (e.g., oral epics, archival records and local histories), this thesis traces the Pahari elite's transition from a nebulous group of lineage-based leaders to a cohesive unitary milieu modelled after contemporary interpretations of Hindu kingship. This nascent ideal of kingship is shown to have fed into concurrent understandings of Rajput society in the West Himalayas and ultimately to have sustained the alliance between indigenous rulers and British administrators.