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vii Acknowledgments I savor the moment when I can thank all the people who have contributed their enthusiasm, suggestions, warmth, and institutional support to this project over the years. In one case, all these qualities coincided with the pleasures of sharing , for a brief time, fieldwork. I begin by thanking Stella. I lived with Stella, her mother, and her children in a coastal village in the 1980s. She accompanied me during the interviews I conducted in 1991 and 1996. As the director of a nongovernmental organization, she allowed me to follow her networks among Dalit women in the villages of Chengalpattu District. Her children, Sheila and Babu (I still cannot stop calling him by his family pet name even after he has become a charismatic leader in his own right), continue to create for me an immediate sense of home no matter where they are in Tamil Nadu, long after they have married, had children, and set up households of their own. I want to thank Pamela Kelley, my editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, for her immediate response to my proposal for this book, and for her understanding and support through the process. She found two superb readers , whose ready appreciation of the wider project of this book and complementary suggestions have both been valuable. I should mention at the outset the importance of institutional and funding support. The Australian Research Council (ARC) gave me a generous five-year research fellowship, which gave me the time I needed for the two ingredients that come together in this book— ethnographic research and a concentrated study of the phenomenological philosophical tradition as represented by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In the decade of teaching that has followed I was never again to have that kind of time: for the leisure to think and read quietly, without continual distraction , is the one resource the management of our university system in Australia does not allow for in its rapid expansion of administrative duties for teaching academics. viii Acknowledgments Two universities in Australia have figured importantly and repeatedly in my scholarly career. I have long valued the Australian National University as a supportive institution. I wish to give particular mention to what was, until recently, the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. There I took my doctorate and spent stimulating years with Margaret Jolly in the 1990s, running a series of key conferences on gender relations in theAsia-Pacific region, editing books together, and helping her establish the Gender Relations Centre in its foundational years. I take this opportunity to thank Margaret for remaining an enduring warm presence in my life, consistently reading my work over the years, always with great generosity of spirit. The Australian National University also remains important to me, the source of frequent invitations to give seminars and workshops in the anthropology series, in the Sexuality and Gender seminar series, and, in recent years, the many workshops to do with India that have been convened by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey. Scholarship on India, especially in the social sciences, has become all too rare in Australia. Another institution has provided me with warm collegiality and a generous environment. This is the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University , which hosted me as an ARC fellow, and is now the department where I teach and where I played a special role as head of the department between 2007 and 2010. The department continues to bring me supportive and stimulating new colleagues to work with, and I cherish the traditions that continue to flourish there, enriched by the contribution of regular visitors such as Jeremy Beckett and Michael Allen, who attend our seminar series. Working together on hosting the annual Australian Anthropological Society conference in 2009, the Research Weeks, which have become annual events, and the lively seminar series on Phenomenology and Anthropology in 2011 have all been highlights of working collegially in creating stimulating intellectual occasions. I particularly want to acknowledge the support and friendship over the years of talented graduates of the department such as Jennifer Deger, Rosemary Wiss, Jovan Maud, and Malcolm Haddon. I value the stimulation of working with my own senior graduate students, whose insights have mingled with my own. My colleagues who helped me set up an interdisciplinary India Research Centre at Macquarie University in 2010, such as Adrian McNeil, Goldie Osuri, Andrew Alter, and Maya Ranganathan, as well as my graduate students, are all helping me realize my dream of nurturing and renewing research on...

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