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9781478029830 Academic Inspection Copy

Tension

Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas
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In Tension, Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call "tension." This "tension" takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; "Future tension" accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how "tension" acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress.
Nikita Kaur Simpson is Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London.
Author's Note ix Preface: A Mother's Body xi Introduction. What is Tension? 1 1. Opara: What is the Reality of Distress 27 2. Kamzori: How Does the Distressed Body Hold Time 59 3. Ghar Ki Tension: Why is Care So Often the Source of Distress? 89 4. Future Tension: What is It About the Future That Generates Distress? 115 5. Pagal: What Happens When Distress Becomes Deviant? 141 Conclusion. Can Tension Travel? 169 Acknowledgments 179 Select Hindi and Gaddi Glossary 183 Notes 187 Bibliography 201 Index
"This beautifully written book offers a glimpse into how ordinary people in the Indian Himalaya experience economic, social, and political upheaval as an intensification of tension in the domain of everyday life. Simpson's loving attention to the texture of intimate relationships, the waning and waxing intensity of atmospheric affects, and the multiplicity of somatic orientations to tension is ethnography at its finest."----Radhika Govindrajan, author of, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas
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