Nadarajah Manickam

Critical events, without doubt, offers exciting reading. There are extremely absorbing ethnographic details, analysis and insights, as might be expected from the work of a scholar of Veena Das’ stature. She has a knack of being forceful in her presentation. Das must have confronted genuine difficulties in taking up such a complex task, but does the work really offer us a way out of the theoretical sluggishness of Indian anthropology? Does it address the reality of India adequately?

This timely book by Syed Farid Alatas, a sociologist currently with the National University of
Singapore (NUS), consists of nine very interesting chapters that bring together a wide variety of alternative discourses in Asian social sciences. In the words of the author, the book ‘addresses a set of problems surrounding the state of the social sciences in Asia. These problems are contextualised within the historical and continuing dominance of one particular civilisational source of knowledge, that is, the Western, over Asian social scientific discourses’ (p. 12). The book offers a sophisticated theoretical, practical and subtle political response to Eurocentrism.

Vaidya Siby’s meaningful book on Ayurveda, Knowledge of Life, is a book about healing and hope. This is in no measure a small feat in a world where people face, on a day-to-day basis and constantly, various degrees of anxiety and hopelessness about their health status and about life and death.

It is not enough to tinker with policies; we need to move beyond the ‘green economy’ that is based on an unsustainable growth-based capitalist orientation, asserts M Nadarajah. Book Reviewed: Adnan A Hezri, The Sustainability Shift: Refashioning Malaysia’s Future (Penang: Areca Books, 2016), 222pp, References, Index