Dignity through Discourse : Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies
Employing a view of culture as a
communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement,
which is deeply influenced by social and economic
inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break
free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is
political and economic. In this paper, they analyze
important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in
Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers