The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts

Smita Tewari Jassal · Eyal Ben-Ari

Jan 2007 · SAGE Publishing India

About this ebook

This important book is a dialogue on the theme of partition and its far-reaching sociological implications for communal patterns, generational dynamics and individual lives. While the governing imagery of partition is drawn from the context of India and Pakistan, the analysis compares similar processes in the context of Israel and Palestine and East and West Germany. Developing the concept of ′partition-societies′, the volume succinctly explains the social, economic and political implications of such divisions.

The lens of partition is used to focus on how societies that have experienced breaks and traumas are organized and constituted and the ways in which they deploy their understanding of the past to reconstruct themselves. The book enquires into ways in which local communities as well as wider national entities use their knowledge of the past. The international contributors to this volume show how this separation was of significance not only in the strict political sense but formed the basis for long-term processes of identity, of memory and inspiration, and the very basis on which different societies were organized.

About the author

Tulsi Patel is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi.

She has recently been Rotating Chair, India Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany for a full semester (2005–06). An Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester (2001–04), she has also undertaken teaching assignments at the London School of Economics and the Royal Holloway College of the University of London (1996–97). Professor Patel has previously taught at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Miranda House (University of Delhi).

Her areas of interest include gender, anthropology of fertility and reproduction, medical sociology, sociology of the family, and old age. She has authored Fertility Behaviour: Population and Society in a Rajasthan Village (1994, 2nd edn 2006) and edited The Family in India: Structure and Practice (2005). In addition, she has published several articles in national and international journals.

Eyal Ben-Ari was Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently Director of the Kinneret Center for Society, Security and Peace at Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee. He has carried out fieldwork on Japanese white-collar suburbs, institutions of early childhood education and the Japanese community in Singapore. In Israel, he has studied Jewish saint-worship and social and cultural aspects of the Israeli military. He is currently engaged in projects on Special Operations Forces, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, anthropological approaches to civil-military relations and creativity in the creative industries.