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King's India Institute cordially invites you to this week's research seminar:
Dalit Rights and the Development Agenda: The Promise, Progress and Pitfalls of Dalit NGO Networking in South India
SPEAKER: Professor David Mosse, School of Oriental & African Studies
Time: 16 MAY 2012, 1630 HRS
Venue: SMALL COMMITTEE ROOM, GROUND FLOOR, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, STRAND CAMPUS
In the 1990s, a rights-based approach to development and the revival of Dalit movements and politics converged to produce a ‘dalitization’ of the field of NGOs. This paper examines how NGOs in south India came to adopt a Dalit rights approach and the significance of the NGO form itself as a vehicle for Dalit social goals. It describes the emergence of a Dalit rights discourse in the context of the relationship between NGOs and their international donors to show how regional caste politics intersects with NGO institutional processes. The paper explores some of the issues and debates around a Dalit rights approach. It explains the uncertainties that this involved – social retaliation, political risk and financial insecurity – and specific organisational responses, in particular the emergence of ‘network’ forms. I will argue that to make sense of the expansion and later fragmentation of certain Dalit NGO networks, two approaches are needed. The first draws on anthropological approaches to ‘the network’ as a mobilising metaphor, a cultural construct or discursive effect. The second adopts an organisational view of the inter-agency relationships that determine the actual practices of Dalit NGOs. Seeing Dalit NGO networking as a two-level process helps focus on the disjuncture between the ‘narrativised network’ and organisational relations— between development of a discourse on Dalit development and the arrangements necessary to sustain coordinate action. This not only explains the success and vulnerabilities of NGO Dalit rights work, but also how NGO donors – supporting network narratives through fund flows into agencies – can amplify the tension between ‘network idea’ and organisational processes to a point of crisis which brings about policy and institutional change.
David Mosse's research combines an interest in the anthropology of development, environmental history and natural resources management, and South Asian society and popular religion. One of his current research projects concerns the ethnography of aid, international development and global governance (e.g. The Aid Effect, 2005: Brokers and Translators 2006. ed with David Lewis). This project follows on from the study of DFID policy and project practice focused on rural livelihoods development in western India (Cultivating Development, 2005). A second on-going project concerns the politics of religious identity, and uses long-term historical and ethnographic research to examine the changing relationship between Christianity and predominantly Hindu south Indian society (The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Popular Christianity and Hindu society in South India, in preparation). This has also led to further study of contemporary dalit movements and the everyday politics of caste in south India.
For inquiries, contact: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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Dr Kriti Kapila
Lecturer in Anthropology and Law
King's India Institute
King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS
Ph: +44 207 848 7053
www.kcl.ac.uk/indiainstitute<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/indiainstitute>
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