Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year. It is sponsored by the Tulane Global Humanities Center. Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for nearly forty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks.
Dowry deaths have risen since the protest years — more than 6,500 in 2022 — even as the public mourning faded. In Public Culture, Kriti Kapila traces the silence to the 1955 reform that cut dowry loose from ritual and let it behave like a commodity.