By Navtej K. Purewal
The choice for male childrens transcends many societies and cultures, making it a subject matter of neighborhood and worldwide dimensions. whereas son choice isn't a brand new phenomenon and has existed traditionally in lots of components of Asia, its modern expressions illustrate the gendered results of social strength kinfolk as they have interaction and intersect with tradition, economic system and applied sciences. Son Preference brings jointly key debates at the topic through assessing present paintings within the box and delivering new insights via fundamental learn. The booklet covers a vast diversity of social technological know-how discussions and attracts upon textual and ethnographic fabric from India. Son Preference can be valuable to scholars, students, activists and somebody drawn to the problems surrounding gender inequity, intercourse choice and skewed intercourse ratios.
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Extra resources for Son Preference: Sex Selection, Gender and Culture in South Asia
Example text
Thus, a place like Punjab can easily become constructed as a field site in its labelling as ‘the killing fields’ or ‘the land of missing or vanishing girls’, closing out other representations of the same field with less circumscribed notions. Unfixing the Field Bounded and ‘sedimented’ approaches to the field are becoming increasingly problem atized through interventions by cultural, postcolonial and diaspora studies (Clifford 1997). Despite this, there has been an on-going resistance to the deconstruction of the lens of the researcher by a continuing focus on the importance of the ‘field’, where continuingly bounded perceptions and representations of culture appear (Narayan 1993).
Zeng Yi et al. 1993, cited in Krishnaji 2001) The quote above presents a ‘commonsense’ explanation of the state of affairs in China with regard to the outcomes of social patterns of son preference, sex selection and state family-planning policies. For our purposes, what is even more interesting is how the statement is utilized to speak of the Indian context: ‘Only a few changes in the above text are needed to describe the Indian situation’ (Krishnaji 2001: 31), which implies that statistical evidence and the analytical reading of two such contrasting national contexts as China and India can utilize the same tools yet adjust the findings according to the specificities that the data point out.
The measured sex ratio at birth can be compared with a suitably selected ‘standard’ sex ratio reflecting known biological patterns to determine the degree to which infants of one sex suffer excess mortality. Second, if the sex ratios are thought to be incorrectly measured, they may be examined to determine the degree to which one gender group is systematically undercounted in a register, survey, or census. (Hull 1990) Thus, following on from this statement, the intellectual project that demographic studies on India have charted out has been one of finding, as Amartya Sen’s (1990) piece coins, India’s ‘missing women’.