Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation

Witch hunts are the result of gendered, cultural and socioeconomic struggles over acute structural, economic and social transformations in both the formation of gendered class societies and that of patriarchal capitalism. This book combines political economy with gender and cultural analysis to explain the articulation of cultural beliefs about women as causing harm, and struggles over patriarchy in periods of structural economic transformation. It brings in field data from India and South-East Asia and incorporates a large body of works on witch hunts across geographies and histories. Witch Hunts is a scholarly analysis of the human rights violation of women and its correction through changes in beliefs, knowledge practices and adaptation in structural transformation.

Govind Kelkar, a feminist scholar, has worked at Delhi University; the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok; Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi; the Institute of Ethnology, Kunming, China; and also with UN-WOMEN. She was founding editor of the journal Gender, Technology and Development.

Dev Nathan, an economist, is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains. He has held positions at Bombay University; the Nehru Memorial Museum Library; the Indian Institute of Advanced Study; the Institute of Ethnology, Kunming, China; and the Duke University GVC Center, USA.