Tag Archives: Sociology and Anthropology

Yashica Dutt’s compellingly gritty tale offers points of identification for probably scores of third or fourth generation Dalits today, who are ‘new’ arrivals in public/professional spaces, as well as those from other marginalized, minority communities. Her memoir is a conscious exercise in reminiscing and examining lives and events, personal and communitarian, including that of her own as a student, as a journalist, and, most germane to this narrative, as a Dalit.

Ethnographic research by its very nature is a dialogue among investigator(s) and subjects. Such translations of a way of life must respect confidentiality, yet properly recognize those so central to making intelligible the lives they live. In this co-authored memoir, scholar, researcher, and grandson, Anand Pandian, critically honours the life and works of his grandfather.

Adam Rutherford, that prolific public intellectual of the life sciences, has now put his words where his heart has quite evidently been for a long time. In this, his 2018 book, The Book of Humans: The Story of How We Became Us (and it is perhaps aptly renamed in the 2019 USA version—Humanimal:  How Homo Sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature—A New Evolutionary History), Rutherford widens his remit from explaining the technical arguments and resultant ideas of evolution…

The notion of professional ethics in the realm of higher education emerges because it is being recognized that professors and instructors are the one (and in many countries the only) group of teachers who are not required to be trained, educated, certified and licensed to teach.  Therefore, they clearly have no structured opportunity to learn about the professional ethics of their roles and responsibilities as teachers.

The articulations of caste and its deployment in India are grey areas that have been swept under the carpet and often rendered invisible in our quotidian lives. Many believe that it is a thing of the past that need not be talked about so vehemently today. But the agony of its experiential terrains, as recorded and performed by the millions who continue to be oppressed by its multipronged techniques of naming and shaming, both covert and overt, is profoundly revelatory.

We need to think carefully about Hinduism today. On the one hand, we have the Hindutvavadis who fabricate a whimsical, fantastic, malignant history of Hinduism. On the other, we have the secularists (Left, modernist, developmentalist) who evade an engagement with the history of Hinduism as a difficult embarrassment best forgotten. What is the truth? Take for example swa-dharma in the Manu Dharmashastra, the dharma applicable to one’s social position.

This book is a rigorous ethnographic study of religious movements in contemporary India. The author has focused upon two faith-based movements, namely, the Svadhyaya and the Tablighi Jamaat. Anindita Chakrabarti had spent several years doing ethnographic research in Gujarat, Mumbai and Delhi. As a sociological study, it states its aims very clearly. It wants to create a dialogue between the broad sub-discipline of sociology of religion with the theories of social movements and collective action.

Sarbeswar Sahoo’s Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India is a significant study of one of the most sensitive issues in the politics of religion in India. Barring the limitation that usually goes with ethnographic studies—the exclusive focus on a limited location in studying what is a pan-Indian issue—this book is a must read for those interested in knowing the truth about conversion and re-conversion in India.

Irfan Ahmad asks the reader to look for something in Islam which we all believed never existed, i.e. critique. He explores critique in Islam, when we understood that Islam was actually hostile to critique. In this book Ahmad has two main arguments; first being that ‘reason, critique, and reflexivity’ did not begin with the Enlightenment or with Kant. Rather, it can be traced back to prophets and savants of the axial age, some of whom we know as founders of major world’s religions.