Tag Archives: Sociology and Anthropology

Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo is a tribute to one of Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s greatest modern thinker, Sam Moyo, who made an astounding contribution to social science with his intellectual work on the land and agrarian questions of the global South.

Rethinking Social Justice was published earlier this year in honour of MSS Pandian, the late historian of South India. The volume comprises an array of essays on a wide range of topics that are thematically organized into five sections: ‘Politics of Culture.

Women constitute a significant composition of Indian diasporic communities universally. Even though the role of female sojourners has been invisible in diasporic accounts for considerable period of time, feminist and subaltern interventions made substantial advancement.

Tribal societies are marked by contestation, competition, movement, conflict, etc., in the contemporary period. These concerns are mainly revolving around the question of livelihood and survival of tribal communities. Their livelihood and survival largely depend.

Coolie Lines is an extensively researched non-fiction which narrates the untold saga of migration. Around two hundred years ago, the British had sent millions of Indians as indentured labourers to countries like Mauritius, Fiji, Surinam, Trinidad and South Africa.

Tawaifnama is born out of Saba Dewan’s trilogy of films on ‘stigmatized’ women performers. The book is a chronicle, a history of different generations of a well-known tawaif family that had its origins in Banaras and Bhabua. The author through the stories of the family.

Ulrich Beck in his much-acclaimed book Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity throws light on the consequences of a wide range of hazardous and deadly risks of a highly industrialized and urbanized society. He further elaborates that modern risks are not restricted to place or time.

For a non-Kashmiri, the ‘word’ Kashmir has, over decades, evoked varied emotions and brought about alternating images of tranquillity and unrest. The ‘place’ Kashmir has witnessed political upheavals, natural disasters and spiritual awakenings over centuries.

Reviewing this collection of essays authored by the gifted MSS Pandian who unexpectedly passed away in 2014, has been a discomfiting experience. A book review is expected to engage with the argument offered in the work. The process results in both praise.

Earlier this year, while the country witnessed protests against the newly amended Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA), the Bharatiya Janata Party’s senior leader and the then Chairperson of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), Nand Kumar Sai.

Ashwani Kumar, lawyer and veteran of the Rajya Sabha for fourteen consecutive years, has contributed several articles over the years to the Tribune, the Indian Express and The Hindu. This new book is a collection of essays on a wide range of issues of contemporary concern.

In this fascinating account of the history of humans on planet earth, Angela Saini pushes  the story of evolution back to 200,000 years, (instead of the more frequent  ‘45,000 years ago’), and presses for a diffused history of mankind, rather than a linear evolutionary model.

The emergence of the ‘biographical turn’ in social science tradition inaugurated a new intellectual movement in capturing the nuances of economic and social change and the ruptures in institutional histories. The past few decades of biographical research.

In normal political discussions, the conscious Ambedkarites are scaled above and admired more over the other ‘non-active’ Dalits. In the post-Ambedkar period, the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra and the formation of the BSP in Uttar Pradesh are two prominent examples.

Jai Bheem, Lal Salaam (Hail the Unity of the Ambedkarites and the Marxists) had become a catchphrase slogan in the aftermath of Rohit Vemula’s suicide in Hyderabad Central University in 2016, which immediately percolated to the streets around the power-corridors.

This is the revised and updated edition of a book originally published in 2003. Maithreyi Krishnaraj’s ‘Note from the Series Editor’ introduces the volume and places it in its context, while Uma Chakravarti’s ‘Afterword: Caste and Gender in the New Millennium’ provides.

Migration, Gender and Care Economy focuses on the intersections of women’s role and their experiences in migration along with the care economy. Historically we know that women in general have been part of the care economy as unpaid carers and low.

Displacement—within and across countries—of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is a fact of contemporary life. UN statistics show that nearly 70 million people, or 9% of the world’s population, are displaced at present.

Snehi and Baghel’s edited volume is a compilation of papers presented at a conference at AIIS in 2010, on the topic of modernity and the changing social fabric of Punjab and Haryana. The essays in this volume are wideranging, and provide a contemporary perspective as well as historical context to many of the present concerns of the region.

Life for peasants in India has always been challenging, but the developments of the last three decades, particularly the post-liberalization era, has created an existential problem for those peasant families who are solely dependent on agriculture. The Indian villages are going through a colossal change due to the impact of a constitutional decentralization mechanism…