Interpreting the Sindhi World: Essays on Society and History - Hardcover

Michel Boivin

9780195477191: Interpreting the Sindhi World: Essays on Society and History

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195477197 ISBN 13: 9780195477191

Publisher: OUP Pakistan, 2010

For more than thirty years, there has not been a project that consolidates international university-level scholarship on Sindh and Sindhis into a single forum. This book seeks to unite the wide community of scholars who work on Sindh and with Sindhis. The book's interdisciplinary focus is on history and society. It represents a 'snap shot' of contemporary research from different disciplines and locations. It combines interdisciplinary and multi-local approaches to describe the diversity of Sindh's 'voices' and to raise questions about how they are historically and socio-culturally defined. Conventional studies of Sindh and Sindhis often bend the region and its people upon themselves to analyze society and history. This collection of essays treats Sindh and its people not as isolated regional entities, but rather entries in a wider socio-cultural and historical web. Sindhis are a global community and this collection generates new perspectives on them by integrating detailed studies on Pakistan with those from India and the diaspora. Such an approach contrasts with other writings by celebrating rather than erasing multi-cultural faces from Sindh's human tapestry. By rethreading unheard socio-cultural and historical voices into understanding Sindh and its people, this collection disputes the vision of Sindhis as a monolithic Muslim population in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

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About the Author:

Michel Boivin is Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, CNRS-EHESS (Paris). After graduation in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Lyon 2, he taught contemporary History of the Muslim world. He is currently Research Fellow at CNRS and is heading the French Interdisciplinary Mission in Sindh (MIFS). His last book, which he is the editor is Sindh Through History and Representations. Published in 2008 by OUP Pakistan, it is a survey of French research in Sindhi studies. Michel Boivin has contributed to many academic journals on Ismailism and Sufism in the 19th-20th c. Sindhi area, both in Pakistan and in India. Matthew A. Cook is Assistant Professor of South Asian Postcolonial Studies at North Carolina Central University. His past teaching appointments include: North Carolina State University, New York University, Columbia University, Hofstra University and Duke University. His research focus is on modern South Asia and the methodological conjunction of anthropology and history. He has authored book chapters, journal articles and reviews published by Oxford University Press, Eastern Anthropologist, Sagar, Columbia Journal of Historiography, Columbia Historical Review, and Educational Practice and Theory and South Asian Review.

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