Innovation: transforming hierarchies in South Asia

Abstract

This special issue examines innovation as social change in South Asia. From an anthropological micro perspective, innovation is moulded by social systems of value and hierarchy and simultaneously potentially transforms them. The articles in this special issue examine a number of innovations in South Asian contexts: the printing press's changing technology and its intersections with communal and language ideologies in India (Peterson); mobile telephony, gender, and kinship in West Bengal (Tenhunen); microcredit and its relationship with social capital in Bangladesh (Uddin); imbalanced sex ratios and the future of marriage payments in north-western India (Jeffery); and how alternative dispute resolution as a social innovation affects battered young wives' life situation options in Sylhet, Bangladesh (Ashrafun and Säävälä). These case studies give insights into how the deeply engrained cultural models and values affect the forms that an innovation process can take. In a social field, actors are not situated symmetrically vis-à-vis an innovation. In South Asian societies that are starkly hierarchical and holistic, innovations may have unpredictable sociocultural repercussions.