Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the flow (...) of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which the flow (...) of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

I point to a colonial care discourse that enabled colonizers to define themselves in relationship to "inferior" colonized subjects. The colonized, however, had very different accounts of this relationship. While contemporary care discourse correctly insists on acknowledging human needs and relationships, it needs to worry about who defines these often contested terms. I conclude that improvements along dimensions of care and of justice often provide "enabling conditions" for each other.

Classical work on Jaina doctrines and philosophy; includes commentary and Hindi translation.

Exhaustive commentary, with text and Gujarati translation, of a verse work on Jaina ethics and Jaina philosophy.

Classical aphoristic work with commentary on Jaina philosophy.

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the 'epistemic privilege of the oppressed' does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed 'insiders' have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving 'outsiders' who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly hurt (...) by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized. (shrink)

pt. 1. Classical versions of Nyāya and Mīmāṁsā theories of Upamāna -- pt. 2. Critical development of the Mīmāṁsa theory of Upamāna -- pt. 3. Critical development of the Nyāya theory of Upmāna -- pt. 4. Some more objections from internal and external critics -- pt. 5. Positive views of two Naiyāyikas.

Papers presented at a seminar held at Department of Philosophy, University of Calcutta from March 15-16, 2011.

Study on creation in R̥gveda and Vedic literature and philosophy.

This essay analyzes why women whose immigration status is dependent on their marriage face higher risks of domestic violence than women who are citizens and explores the factors that collude to prevent acknowledgment of their greater susceptibility to battering. It criticizes elements of current U.S. immigration policy that are detrimental to the welfare of battered immigrant women, and argues for changes that would make immigration policy more sensitive to their plight.

Dislocating Cultures takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas.

This essay analyzes why women whose immigration status is dependent on their marriage face higher risks of domestic violence than women who are citizens and explores the factors that collude to prevent acknowledgment of their greater susceptibility to battering. It criticizes elements of current U.S. immigration policy that are detrimental to the welfare of battered immigrant women, and argues for changes that would make immigration policy more sensitive to their plight.

Copyright is accepted as being the necessary and efficient response to the need of authors and publishers to appropriate the economic value of copyright works from users. Nevertheless, difficulties arise when such works are both produced and consumed within universities. The law recognizes that copyright cannot be an absolute right and in certain circumstances, the scope of copyright protection is limited by the statute. Where educational usage of works is concerned, the British copyright law has attempted to balance the rights (...) of the individual academic user, the duties of universities and their libraries, and the rights of the copyright owners. However, recent case-law suggests that the correct balance between the interests of copyright owners on the one hand, and the interests of education and scholarship on the other has not been achieved especially where the educator and the copyright author reside in a single individual. The article employs stakeholder analysis to discern whether there should be a re-evaluation of the law so that copyright law and policy better reflect the interests of key participants within the educational sector. (shrink)

Historical and cultural study of Yoga tradition in India from the earliest time.

As the term "family values" achieves prominence in the rhetoric of political debate, the social issues at the heart of today's political controversies deserve to be studied in depth. This volume brings together a group of philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars to explore a wide range of specific topics dealing with the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of familial relationships. Topics addressed include the rights of unwed fathers, the nature of children's autonomy, children's rights to divorce their parents, parental (...) rights with respect to medical treatment and religious education of children, surrogate parenting, same-sex parenting, and single-parent families. Collectively, the essays point out that many contemporary issues pertaining to the having and raising of children pose genuinely hard choices for public policy makers, for those who make and enforce the laws, and for citizens who would like to engage in informed and critical democratic debate on these issues. (shrink)

This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological issues in women in management research, as the field emerges out of its adulthood and steps into the age of maturity. The four fundamental issues addressed are (i) the need to conduct extensive research in this area; (ii) the need for synthesizing previous research findings and establishing a solid theory base on which further work can progress; (iii) the appropriate methodologies for generating further knowledge in the area; and (iv) future directions for research (...) on women in management, taking both a basic and applied research perspective. (shrink)

Many feminists of color have demonstrated the need to take into account differences among women to avoid hegemonic gender-essentialist analyses that represent the problems and interests of privileged women as paradigmatic. As feminist agendas become global, there is growing feminist concern to consider national and cultural differences among women. However, in attempting to take seriously these cultural differences, many feminists risk replacing gender-essentialist analyses with culturally essentialist analyses that replicate problematic colonialist notions about the cultural differences between "Western culture" and (...) "non-Western cultures" and the women who inhabit them (Narayan 1998). Seemingly universal essentialist generalizations about "all women" are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalizations that depend on totalizing categories such as "Western culture,' "non-Western cultures," "Indian women," and "Muslim women." The picture of the "cultures" attributed to these groups of women remains fundamentally essentialist, depicting as homogeneous groups of heterogeneous peoples whose values, ways of life, and political commitments are internally diverge. (shrink)

Irregularity may occur on the earth’s surface in the form of mountains due to the imperfection of the earth’s crust. To explore the influence of horizontally polarized shear waves on mountains, we considered the fluid-saturated porous medium over an orthotropic semi-infinite medium with rigid and soft mountain surfaces for wave propagation. The mountain surface is defined mathematically as a periodic function of the time domain. The physical interpretation of materials’ structure has been explained in rectangular Cartesian coordinate system originated at (...) the contact interface of layer and half-space. The displacement of the mountains has been derived by solving energy equations analytically. The influence of rigid and soft mountain surfaces on the phase velocity of shear waves has been demonstrated graphically. (shrink)