Shiptown. Ann Grodzins Gold

      Between August 2010 and June 2011 I lived in the town of Jahazpur in Rajasthan, North India, and practiced anthropology as best I could. Bhoju Ram Gujar and his daughters were companions, helpers, and genuine partners in producing whatever ethnographic knowledge I am able to offer here. The writing is mine, for better or worse. I relied on so much assistance from my Rajasthani family that I intended their names to appear on the title page as coproducers, although not as coauthors, of the study. Paperwork obstacles prevented this or rendered it a struggle for which I had not sufficient gumption. I have highlighted their contributions on the dedication page to acknowledge up front my respect, gratitude, and dependence on their help.

      I liked living in Jahazpur. The people I met were kind and cordial. I perceived a straightforwardness to relationships and attitudes, even when sporadically contentious. If my husband wrangled with our somewhat difficult landlord over money, members of the landlord’s family still regularly brought us plates with samples of the special delicious treats they prepared for innumerable festivals. Our sitting room was, after all, right above their cooking area, and many enticing fragrances came through the open grating. When a friend’s son was injured in a brief street squabble among young men, the person who injured him appeared at the door the next day, utterly contrite, and bringing prasad (blessed leftovers) from the goddess temple as a peace offering. While proximity can sometimes lead to unredeemable fissures, as recent global history depressingly shows, part of my larger point in this book is that proximity untroubled by political manipulations normally leads to benign forms of familiarity: to greet, to share food, to chat about banalities. These simple interchanges are worth something.¹

      After about a third of my time in Jahazpur was up, I wrote the following:

      I have become acquainted with a lot of extraordinary characters; no one could ever convince me that small-town people are boring, or “all the same.”² There are, to sample just a few: our Brahmin neighbor-woman who keeps an extraordinary variety of vows and fasts every month—twenty days out of thirty without exaggeration—and whose house is lavishly adorned with her own decorative handiwork in every medium from needlework to woven plastic; the goldsmith who shut down his jewelry shop to work for the Tulip insurance network and describes