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Sylvia J.
Vatuk
Professor Emerita
(PhD Harvard University 1970)
Room 2110-B BSB (312) 413-3575 vatuk@uic.edu
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Social anthropology, kinship, urban anthropology,
aging; South Asia.
My theoretical interests within social anthropology lie in the area of kinship and social organization, with a regional specialization in South Asia. I have conducted field research in India in several urban settings on changing kinship and family structures, marriage and gift exchange, gender roles, aging and intergenerational relations, family history and family law. My earlier research and publications dealt with Hindus in northwestern India, specifically western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Later I turned to the study of Muslim society in southern India, beginning with a long-term social-historical study of a large extended family of Islamic religious scholars. In that study I examined the family’s adaptation to the economic, political and social transformations of the colonial and post-colonial eras, from the early 19th century to the present. More recently I have been engaged in a study of Muslim Personal Law and its impact on women, in connection with which I have been carrying out ethnographic and archival research in the cities of Hyderabad and Chennai.
Some representative
publications in the above-mentioned areas
are:
2008 “Islamic Feminism in India? Indian Muslim Women Activists and the Reform of Muslim Person Law.” In F. Osella and C. Osella, eds., Islamic Reform in India, Special Issue, Modern Asian Studies 42/2 & 3.
2008 “Divorce at the Wife’s Initiative in Muslim Personal Law: What are the Options and What are Their Implications for Women’s Welfare?” In Archana Parashar & Amita Dhanda, eds., Redefining Family Law in India: Essays in Honour of B. Sivaramayya, pp. 200-235. London and New Delhi: Routledge.
2006 “Bharattee’s Death: Domestic Slave-Women in Nineteenth-Century Madras.” In Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History, pp. 210-233. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
2005 “Moving the Courts: Muslim Women and Personal Law.” In Zoya Hasan & Ritu Menon, eds., The Diversity of Muslim Women’s Lives in India, pp. 18-58. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
2004 “Hamara Daur-i Hayat: An Indian Muslim Woman Writes her Life.” In David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds., Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History, pp. 144-174. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
2002 “Older Women, Past and Present, in an Indian Muslim Family.” InS. Patel. J. Bagchi and K. Raj, eds., Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner, pp. 247-263. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
2001 “‘Where Will She Go? What Will She Do?’ Paternalism Toward Women in the Administration of Muslim Personal Law in Contemporary India.” In G. J. Larson, ed., Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment, pp. 226-238. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
1996 “Identity and Difference or Equality and Inequality in South Asian Muslim Society.” In C. Fuller, ed., Caste Today, pp. 227-262. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1992 “Forms of Address in North India: The Family Domain.” In A. Ostor, S. Barnett, and L. Fruzzetti, eds., Concepts of Person, 2nd ed., pp. 56-98. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1990 “The Cultural Construction of Shared Identity: A South Indian Family History,” Social Analysis 28: 114-131.
1990 “‘To Be a Burden on Others’: Dependency Anxiety among the Elderly in India.” In Owen M. Lynch, ed., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, pp. 64-88. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.