Course Catalog

The village and the rural has been variously conceived in anthropology as ‘little republic’, as ‘traditional society’, as ‘little community’, as a microcosm of culture and signifier of unadulterated indigenous life, as one end of a continuum (rural to urban) where the village stood for a kind of communal living marked by a functional blending of different occupational groups, as representing ‘rural cosmopolitics’, and more recently as a somewhat problematic category, riddled with erroneous representations, exoticisms and practices of ossification rather than any real processual understanding of the changes and flows that emanate from village life. This course will examine how various intellectual currents have informed the study of rural life. We will first examine scholarship on the village from a historical perspective and its changing dimensions over different periods and the dramatic reshaping and concretization of the category of the village under colonisation. We will then delve into how ‘village studies’ analysis from Srinivas onwards, drew on modernization theory and conceptions of the Indic and Indian categories of thought in order to understand the representations of the everyday, as well as development and modernization. The course will then focus on how historical methods have become central to a critical examination of the formation of categories associated with the village, and how post-colonial and post-structuralist thought has shaped the study of hierarchy, religion, development, leadership, and social movements. We will then proceed to examine the various intellectual currents that are central to more recent ethnographies on village society, poetics and politics; as well as scrutinize how representations in anthropology have informed state and non-state policies and practices that impact people’s everyday lives in the village. We will examine other innovative dimensions of studying the village: how it may be understood as a more ontological and mobile idea creating fertile ground for novel relationships and horizons. We will also discuss the debates and contestations in anthropology and sociology that inform our contemporary understanding of the village, and what we can learn from them.

Rap music is one among the various musical genres of American “popular culture” that emerged at the intersection of major technological advances in the sound recording and broadcasting industry and the post-colonial critique of Europe as the model of artistic expressions and aesthetics. The subsequent emergence of USA as the world power and the processes of ‘globalization’ facilitated a wide circulation and consumption of the musical genres invigorating a yet another process of the emergence of “hybrid” forms of artistic expression in several regions in the world. Rap music stands apart from other musical genres because of its roots in the overtly “political” and subversive discourse of anti-racism and self respect and its co-habitation along with other expressive forms like breakdance, DJaying/turntablism/scratching, sampling and graffiti making it part of a larger Hip Hop culture. As a musical genre Rap also stands apart because of its distance from melody and harmony and emphasis on the beat and a verbal delivery proximate to poetry and poetic narrative genres. Even as one element in the formation of “black” or African American artistic expressions and black aesthetics and the ensuing debates on subversive taste, in the case of Rap ( and Hip Hop) the debates are far more intense. On the one hand, the intensity is produced at the intersection of racist and anti racist thought and on the other hand, Rap, right from the early times also produced internal debates about its sexist and misogynist attitudes. The aggressive forms of “Gangsta Rap” added a further salience to these debates. Early scholars of American Hip Hop and Rap, often locate it simultaneously in the larger context of “popular culture” and urban studies; as elaborations of black-aesthetics and the making of the “inner city” or the “hood” and gang wars, for example. Simultaneously, this scholarship also traces the journey of Hip Hop out of the streets and gangs into the “culture industry” and the participation of non-black artists and consumers and the subsequent debates around community, ownership, appropriation and authenticity. Most of this scholarship combines an ethnographic and culture studies approach. More recent scholarship has reviewed these debates and refined the scholarship in two ways. On the question of the history of Rap and Hip Hop, it has challanged the claim of singular ‘black’ ownership by drawing more nuanced genealogies of Hip Hop to other participations such as Latino American and Asian migrant populations in USA. Secondly, extending the scope of culture studies and ethnographic studies through musicological and ethnomusicological approaches scholars have been more attentive to the interconnections between musical ideas and their place in the formation of the social around this music, often making new concepts for understanding these interconnections.

Sociology in its chronological origin relies heavily on the organic to think through the ideas of society. However, it is in the long twentieth century that the organic gives way to the biological and the thoughts and concepts of classical sociology are reenacted. This course is conceived as a refracted introduction to classical sociology through a biomedical biography of the twentieth century. This introduction primarily involves encountering an ascendance and routinization of biomedicine through a series of concepts, instances, perspectives and approaches. Sociologically speaking it means that we register the movement of the discipline from its early focus on health as a biological given to a late twentieth century preoccupation with technical understandings of disease, illness and sickness. One way to register this movement is to see how the biological, biomedical and the biopolitical might concede some ground to the biosocial. Another way to see the same movement is to pitch the biomedical in relation to different alternate medical epistemologies and alternate territories of social suffering and powers of sickness. We will use both these ways and finally arrive at a confluence of illness and narratives to evaluate the textures of illness and its subjective experiences at the level of language, culture and ordinary existence. It is at this level of illness narratives that we can see the imbrication of the biomedical and the biosocial by noticing the actual moral concerns involved in the simple aim of gaining health. Summing up: we start with the select concepts of health, disease, illness and sickness and follow the polythetic connections between them in relation to the ideas of the normal and the pathological. We follow that up with a theoretical and ethnographic discussion on political biology, biopolitics, biological citizenship and the biosocial. We then move to the third section on the ontological multiplicity of the biomedical clinic in relation to alternate medical epistemologies and territories. Finally, we end with a section on illness and narratives that would deepen the discussions of the earlier three sections and would also enable us to recognize the ethnographic actuality of the medical contemporary.

We inhabit the world through our bodies. We move through the world with our bodies. We feel pain in our bodies. And yet more often than not, we give barely a thought to our bodies. It is a natural, physiological given. This course aims to go beyond the biological givenness of the human body, questioning its presumed universality in nature, culture and society. In this course, we will situate the individual body within the social, examining it in diverse ways and through a range of anthropological approaches. We will look at the body as representational and symbolic, as the site of inscribing and resisting power; we will consider techniques of the body and the body as technology; and we will study how the world is experienced in embodied ways that is, through the very materiality of the body. In doing so, we will understand the body in its complex corporeal and yet social aspects. Thus, this course understands the body as both deeply personal and intensely social, even when it is subjected to scientific and presumably ‘objective’ interrogation. Questions of identity, power, agency, ethics, gender, caste, ethnicity, and class will all feature in our discussions. We will also try to move beyond the human body, taking into consideration the other-than-human beings such as microbes that constitute our body, as well as the larger social worlds within which we are situated. Readings will involve a mix of anthropological classics and contemporary texts, as well as texts from allied disciplines to engage us in a critical understanding and examination of the body.

Methodology is the primary premise for the development of this course. In Sociology and Social Anthropology there is a long established tradition of theorizing caste under the topic of social stratification and hierarchy. The debates on whether it is a cultural system or a structural system decide its geo-political locations. Under this umbrella, the deployment of stucturalist and interpretive frameworks produced some key investigations of caste. A decisive re-evaluation of these approaches was based on the rejection of the idea of caste as a “system” of hierarchy but a site of struggle for political power. Begun as an ethnographic study of pre-colonial India, subsequent studies in historical anthropology/historical sociology drew attention to the emergence of the radical anti-caste public sphere opposite the reformist cultural nationalist public sphere in colonial India. This and the subsequent development of the anti-caste thought need to be an important part of a social science pedagogy for understanding the another dimension of the social, the creation of new genres of writing the social life as well as the new forms of theorization. For this purpose the course needs to take a short detour from sociological and anthropological studies and focus on literature.

Field, Archive, Ethnography is a workshop oriented methods course. The mandate of this course is to equip sixth semester sociology students to work on their undergraduate thesis which they will be doing in their fourth year of B.A. Sociology. This course will work through an engaged reading of various kinds of ethnographies complemented by a hands-on methodological project that students will undertake within the physical space of the university. Theoretically, the course will work along deciphering and teasing out the difference between the three parallel axes of field, archive and ethnography. Asking questions of what constitutes a field and how do we construct or use an archive in the writing of an ethnography is the central thrust of the course. Students trained in the field of sociology/anthropology fundamentally need to work with the idea of researching and thinking about events, phenomena and processes, placed within the immediate sphere of the known or located within the realm of the unfamiliar or the alien. In probing all such contexts, the eventual object that emerges is a combination of what one produces as an understanding of that context (ethnography) along with that which informs the production of this understanding (theory) and the ways in which one collates words, meaning and approaches (method) to begin the process of this understanding. The anthropological object is but a combination, whether in sync or in flux, of theory, method and ethnography or in other words a coming together of fieldwork, archive and ethnography. This course will work with these questions theoretically as well as through a workshop style pedagogy that enables them to read ethnographies methodologically and do a hands-on methodological intervention within the stipulated duration of the course. The chief learning outcome of this course is to enable students of Sociology to understand how the discipline of sociology is but a combination of theory and method and how the doing of field work and working on and through an archive allows for the emergence of this elusive object called ethnography – the distinct marker of our discipline.

The core aim of this course is to convey a complex, nuanced and robust conceptual matrix adequate to the two categories in the subtitle of the course: State and Citizenship. What are the diverse kinds of political organisations and states that have existed over time, and what indeed is the changing nature of citizenship? What is it that has come to be understood as state-based societies as opposed to those perceived as acephalous or head-less societies? Questions such as how leadership, power and authority operates and circulates and how such societies organise themselves and ensure their longevity are addressed along with studies of kingdoms sovereignties and colonial states, through deciphering their organising structures and principles, and how power and influence is manifested and retained in such formations such as the ‘theatre-state’ and through the ‘exemplary centre.’ We address discussions and debates on what are understood as ‘societies of contract’ with the establishment of modern statehood, and the emergence of the category of citizenship, as well as the contradictions implicit in these; also addressing the nature of governmentality and the regime of biopolitcs. There is an exploration of the formation of modern bureaucracies as well as a grounded ethnographic understanding of their labyrinthine processes, and of those who are caught up in the labyrinth. The checkered nature of the dynamics of political identity, citizenship and its margin are negotiated through ethnographies that bring out the encounter, or the lack thereof, of the margin and the state as well as the agentive aspect of the encounter. While debates on aspects of the political help us to mull over the intricacies, ideas and gaps that exist within deliberative democracies and contemporary politics. Delving into the nature of constitutional and insurrectionary politics, along with the above, help us to arrive at the stated objective of the course. The nature of the post-state era in contemporary times is a possible addition to the material already discussed.

This course aims to introduce students to sociological and anthropological currents of thought, both classical and contemporary, regarding social practices and relations that constitute economic life. Sociological and anthropological perspectives help reconceptualise notions of the ‘economy’ itself, and broaden it beyond quantified and predictable metrics. These perspectives situate economic actions and relations within a larger and more nuanced framework of social, cultural and political specificities. For this purpose, an examination of the subthemes of market, exchange and obligation serve as lenses through which to approach economic life. The course broadens the scope of the market to situate it within larger systems of social exchange that involve relations of obligation and reciprocity, distribution and consumption, and trust and honour. Dwelling on these through old and new texts, theoretical and ethnographic, bring us to a nuanced understanding of how the economic cannot be studied simply in terms of itself. Based on varied understandings of different kinds of markets and exchange relations, we shall challenge commonsensical distinctions between gift and commodity, self-interest and generosity, and formal and informal economies. In addition, the course will also examine contemporary issues of debt and precarity, and their socio-economic implications. The prescribed readings are chosen with an eye to both classical and contemporary texts to give students an idea of the ways in which the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology have approached the economy over time, responding to older texts and formulating new concepts and theories. The texts also represent several regions of the world in addition to South Asia in order to provide a range of contexts. By the end of the course, students are expected to have a broad understanding of key sociological and anthropological approaches to economic life; be able to explain how the economic and the non-economic are intertwined; and be able to analyse and reflect on contemporary issues related to the economy in light of the course.

This course designed for first year students of Sociology major is meant to introduce, in a preliminary way, the history of the discipline. It intends to this in two ways – on the one hand it will lay out the history, not in a linear fashion of a chronology but through the lens of its defining methodological principle – ethnography. On the other hand this course will lay out the contours of the discipline in the way it straddles the term Sociology and Social Anthropology, how we work with both in the world and how our empirical location of the global south allows for a particular understanding to emerge. The course content will work largely through ethnographies written and produced from early twentieth century to contemporary times. It will deal with ethnographies considered to be classical to ethnographies from a wide range of empirical locations including those of South Asia and women ethnographers and so forth. This course will begin with an introduction to some of the classical ethnographic inquiries not focusing on what they investigate per se but thinking about how one mode of inquiry in one part of world at a moment in time could be connected or read in conjunction with another mode of inquiry across time and space. This would enable students to grasp and understand the transition that a discipline can be marked with and how we work in acknowledgement of these shifts and transitions. The chief learning outcome of this course is for students to realise why we frame the discipline the way we do and how they should be aware of the transition of the discipline through the conceptual propositions it makes and think about the relevance of a discipline like social anthropology to investigate complex realities of the contemporary lived world.  

This course traces the major debates in the expansion of feminist theory into queer studies. Taking the theorization of sex-gender system as the moment of beginning the course traverses some important theoretical texts through intersectionality to a critique of sex-gender system and the beginnings of the theory of gender performativity.

Anthropologists are increasingly investigating how climate change is effecting the social worlds we live in and our conceptions of the same. This is tied to the fact that the phenomenon of climate change is effecting our quotidian lives in multifarious ways which are often beyond our control even though climate change is recognized as an ‘anthropogenic’ (caused by human actions) phenomenon. This course will introduce students to the new but rich sub-discipline of the anthropology of climate change, by questioning how humans have become the center of public debate and international policy precisely as it remains unclear what the future world effected by climate change holds. This will be taken up by investigating how different communities are dealing with climatic effects on their everyday, how scientists/experts studying climate change are engaging with the issue at hand, how economies of the world are increasingly becoming imbrued in debates about emissions and access to natural resources and how the very conception of our social worlds is changing through entities like air pollution, weather and heat amongst others.   

Modernity has become a defining feature in contemporary societies. It marks the coming together over the centuries of philosophical principles and technological developments, the two trends strengthening each other. Through those means the modern human aims at freeing itself from the previous bounds of former beliefs in which human actions were defined and limited. Modernity defines itself as a point of departure from pre-existing societies and locates its genesis in the Renaissance and 18th century scientific investigative mind embodied by the encyclopedists. From the 19th century onwards, modernity has defined the core principles of policy making and philosophical debates or atleast acted as the reference to define them. Stemming from modernity are notions such as the traditional, the folk, the backward, the classic, the pre-modern and the post-modern. It accompanies the building up of nation states and imposes a vision of society and humanity as well as a set of values. As such, it has driven societal choices but has also been the object of critique and questioning from the 19th to the 21st century. Modernity will be looked at both as a phenomenon and as a notion through multiples angles and perspectives with lectures by faculty from Sociology, Literature, History and Fine Arts departments. How does one locate him/herself in regard to modernity? Have humans defined themselves as master of their own destiny only in the modern period? Has modernity allowed humans to achieves their goals to free themselves from the bounds of beliefs? The notion won’t be looked at as only a western and recent concept. Other historical and cultural influences constitutive of modernity will also be considered.

“I am spiritual but not religious” is a phrase we have often heard, perhaps even said ourselves. But what does it mean to be spiritual? This course will explore the many discourses and practices that are labelled as “spiritual”. In the process, we will examine some of the central characteristics of spirituality – its supposed opposition to religion and “materialism”. Does spirituality really offer the possibility of a cosmopolitan world, drawing seekers from a range of ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds? Can spirituality overcome the differences thought to be reinforced by religion? And does spirituality represent a critique of “materialism”, or is spiritual seeking a product of the culture of choice? The course will combine instructor based lectures with seminar style presentations by students. Assessment will be based on presentations, a short paper, and an end-of-course assignment.

Sociological themes of the collective and the individual have animated studies of legal pluralism. The assumptions underlying state law is that the individual is atomistic, agentive and bound by social contract. Non-state legal forums such as councils, religious institutions and customary law tend to be based on adherence to authority, relationality and plurality. This course addresses these distinctions through various perspectives by drawing on themes in contemporary anthropology that include the genealogy of the modern subject, temporality, ethics, and materiality.

The UG Thesis is a supervised research work that all UG students of the department carry out in their fourth year. The UG Thesis I and II for a total of 16 credits is spread over the seventh and eighth semester and each student is free to work on a topic of one's interest with an allotted supervisor. A student is free to work on any area or field of interest as long as the research question is sociological.   In UG Thesis part II (8 credits) the student continues with field and or archival work and writes a 10000 to 12000 word thesis to be submitted for evaluation along with an oral presentation to all members of the department. 

Phd scholars conduct a pilot study and write an extended proposal on their area of research under the guidance of their faculty supervisor. 

This course is the first of a two-part survey of concept and theory in Sociology and Social Anthropology (S/SA), that will be undertaken over two semesters of PhD course work. In the first semester, a selection of founding concepts and theorists will lay the ground for approaching theoretical and conceptual work in social research. Course readings and structure are designed as a chronological first part to a subsequent second part which will be conducted in the second semester of PhD coursework on concept and theory. This seminar will begin with a two-strand approach, respectively Sociology and Social Anthropology and the course will engage with classical concepts and historical perspectives in both. In addition, an introductory discussion about how the disciplines find shape in India will be part of the seminars in this part. The course will bring about an in-depth understanding of the development of theoretical/conceptual interventions into the social, the convergence of multidisciplinary perspectives and a state-of-the-art view. For both of those class participants who are new to these disciplines or those familiar with theory and concept in S/SA, this course intends to train an analytical perspective on research on the social, develop a rigorous theoretical basis to empirical research, as well as a critical attitude in analysis. The intention is to allow students to be able understand, choose, mediate, and apply theoretical analysis adequately to objects of social research.