Tag Archives: Sociology and Anthropology

As India inches close to 75th anniversary of Independence, self-introspection about hurdles it has to overcome in policy and implementation domain needs to be debated. The book under review brings together fourteen well-researched papers based on field-level experiences of States across the country, interrogating critical dimensions of rural human development in contemporary India that need attention for percolation of developmental benefits to every corner of India.

The Indian growth story attracted global attention first, on account of the spurt in growth from the 1990s, and second, on account of its deviation from one of the most widely replicated patterns of the evolution of sectoral shares of agriculture, manufacturing and services in the gross domestic product (GDP) over time.  This thumb rule, stylized by Kuznets, Chenery and Taylor (KCT), was found to closely fit the evidence gathered from advanced countries and also developing ones outside the socialist bloc, over two whole centuries.

The three books under review critically contribute to our understanding of Gender, Inclusion, Violence and Social Justice. They capture several evidences of gender inequality, violence and exclusion across all levels; but they also show how gender issues in India can be read through different lenses of justice; how scholars, advocates and activists addressing these issues have brought different dimensions to the table, even conflicting at times.  

Social Scientist in South Asia: Personal Narratives, Social Forces and Negotiations is an important recent publication from Routledge. Along with an Introduction, the book comprises a collection of nineteen essays, divided into two parts. Part I, themed ‘Engagement with Disciplinary Prisms: Expanding Horizons’ has essays by Imrana Qadeer, Ghazala Jamil, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Savyasaachi, Maitrayee Choudhury, SS Sivakumar, Gargi Chakravarty, N Sukumar and Sukrita Paul Kumar. Part II, themed ‘Reflections on Disciplinary Practices: Pedagogy and Research’ has essays by Chandan Kumar Sarma, Manosh Chowdhury, Mohammad Talib, Nirmal Kumar, Kavita A Sharma, Nirmal Kirmani, Shonaleeka Kaul and Vinay Kumar Srivastava.

Rajesh Kasturirangan’s book Who Are We? sets out to play with the oft deliberated, debated, dissected and derived idea of what makes the Indian way of being and more specifically as the author states, the Indian way of thinking. Culture impacts the way we perceive, feel and think—as stated by cultural psychologist Richard Nisbett, and also leads to different self construals (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Kasturirangan appropriates and reappropriates the place of this book and his ‘theory’ on the vast canvas of many other such writings and clarifies right at the beginning of the book its aim and purpose, ‘I am less interested in a culturally encoded storehouse of thoughts and feelings and more interested in how cognitive schemas change over time, how new ideas emerge and are layered on top of the old. I will focus on mind in motion.’

The ethnographic desire to render the textures of the ordinary is contingent on the close attention to detail that the anthropologist can command. But the question is—what kind of detail and how much detail?  Detailing the ordinary plugs, the centre of this intense text marks the crucial meeting points of anthropology and philosophy. A critical question that anthropologists must settle on is ‘what kind of information can be counted as knowledge?’ Ethnographic practices involve a wide range of activities in the form of gathering data by conducting surveys, drawing figures and maps, engaging in conversations and discussions, exploring the micro-geographies of localities, tracing local histories and so on.

‘To assert that “Black Lives Matter” is to admit that they do not matter while maintaining that they should.’Nathalie Etoke, born in Paris to Cameroonian parents, and who has lived in France and later in the United States, occupies a unique position which allows her to deal with questions of race as also to argue against a tendency which ends up reducing the historical, political, cultural and social differences…

Tara Kaushal set out on a journalistic journey, interviewing nine men accused of rape and gang rape to analyse the psychological temperament of the rapist. The book is the roller coaster of emotions and a mentally intertwined journey on ‘Why Men Rape’. The commonly evident documentation of patriarchy…

Popular and academic discourses on Northeast India have for long been centred around the themes of conflicts, ethnicity and insurgency. This is not surprising given that the region has been seen as a ‘troubled periphery’ marked by ‘durable disorder’. Seen against this backdrop, the book under review marks a significant…f

Narratives about lives popularly regarded as successful or marked by significant achievements, written by celebrities or eminent public figures, have always been eagerly received by a wider reading public. However, writings by those at the margins have visibly toppled the conventions of this genre in the twentieth century…

Reverence for the Prophet of Islam through an affirmation of his exceptionality has a contested legacy and an emotional salience that has captured the imagination of the political landscape of South Asia. Recently, the National Assembly of Pakistan was pressed to debate its infamous blasphemous laws in the context of the demand…

Abiochemist and a health journalist come together to write about what happens when biology and history come together—the field of archaeogenetics opens up and lets the human story unfold in exciting new ways. In fact, the authors state that genetics must become an essential element of historical writing…

The book by Debal K SinghaRoy provides an exquisite illustration of the situational reconstruction of new, fluid and layered identities in collective mobilizations, along the axis of caste, class, tribe, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship and social movements, resulting from the unprecedented social transformation caused by the spread…

In the existing scenario whereby the literature on urban life in India has almost reduced urban neighbourhoods to abstract monolithic entities embodying human settlements, and the ecology thereof, to the utter neglect of the embeddedness of these settlements in different communitarian identities and categorical values…

This work, an important contribution to the gendered history of colonial Indian labour migration, offers a fresh perspective on coolie women’s everyday experiences and their contribution as producers and reproducers of labour to the plantation economy of Federated Malaya States (FMS) in British Malaya…

The book under review is Nabaparna Ghosh’s crisp treatise about the para or the neighbourhood in colonial Calcutta. The book has four chapters apart from a very well laid out introduction and a tight epilogue. The introduction outlines the plan of the book and raises a number of questions…

Undermining Racial Justice is an archival exploration of the movement for racial justice that gripped the University of Michigan (henceforth UM) from the 1960s. Divided into eight lucidly written chapters complemented by an introduction and a discerning epilogue…

In the book under review Nazima Parveen looks at the transformation of Shahjahanabad, which later became Old Delhi, between 1850 and the 1970s to understand the deep segregation that has emerged between the city’s Hindu and Muslim populations in terms of residential living…

(Hi)Stories of Desire is set to be a landmark publication on culture in modern India. It maps this via the route of sexualities and draws upon a diverse set of disciplinary locations and research to do so. In addition to a very comprehensive introductory chapter co-authored…

Ever since I had started listening to rock music in my early teens, one of the most unusual figures I have come across is Henry Rollins. Rollins began as a front man for Black Flag, a band that is part of the canon of punk rock in its later period, and later made a name as the founder of Rollins Band…