Course Catalog

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.  

Privilege and Dispossession:..

Marx, Weber and Durkheim are essential thinkers for understanding sociology. All three thinkers are foundational to the discipline and among the foremost theorists of modernity and its ensuing complexities. This course will introduce students to the three thinkers, and how they may be interpreted in the current context. The course shall work through original and other significant readings, and elaborate upon key themes relevant to each thinker, focusing on how their ideas have helped shape and forge the discipline of sociology till the present time.   

The concept as well as the disciplinary history of nomadic peoples and nomadism deserves academic scrutiny. Nomads contribute substantially to the economies, environments and cultures of the world, yet, mobile peoples remain largely ignored in the academy, and hundreds of nomadic communities remain surprisingly invisible and un-enumerated as citizens. The region’s mobile past, with shifting villages, markets, fields, fairs, itinerant singers and performers — juxtaposed with the obscurity of such a life in the present time — deserves close examination, as the mechanisms of flexibility and pliability continue to foster large populations of nomads across the world who persist in spite of daunting odds. The course aims to introduce students to the sociology of nomads and nomadism as well as the relationship between nomads and the sedentary world. Distinction between nomadic and sedentary communities is not always clear. While some groups exhibit a curious blend of city-state, tribe, and nomadism, others zealously guard their distinctiveness. Taking students through how scholars have long struggled to define and understand nomads — there are many different types of them, whether pastoral, peripatetic, service or itinerant nomads, sea nomads or even bards and tellers of myths, among others — research on nomadism has endeavoured to identify and overcome the multiple biases that affect interpretations surrounding this area of study, the nature of pastoral nomadism as a cultural and economic adaptation with its diverse ramifications, gradual or abrupt sedentarisation, the repercussions of political changes around them, their intertwining with other sectors of a regional culture and economy, all, leading us to question when we can hesitate to ask how and when we can qualify a settled nomad as being no longer nomadic? Through such predicaments and argumentations in this course, we as a class shall endeavour to arrive at a clearer understanding of the world of nomads and nomadism, and we hope this rather singular worldview shall help us to ask questions from the ‘sedentary-civilised’ world that are enriched from the nomadic frontier.

This course is designed to introduce students to the emergence of the idea of the sociology of science in the discipline and how these ideas aid in engaging with science and scientific objects sociologically. To understand this, the course will be divided into two sections: Concepts and Approaches; and Ethnographies of Science. The first section – Concepts and Approaches – will trace the historical emergence of the sociology of science, by laying emphasis on central concepts and varied theoretical approaches that have become seminal to understanding not only how the sub-discipline has developed but how an analysis of ‘science’ can be undertaken sociologically. The second section – Ethnographies of Science – will highlight how ethnographic studies of science and scientists have been undertaken in different domains such as laboratories, environment planning, technological warfare and biomedicine amongst others.   

The course focuses on studying culture in Modern India. Drawing upon theoretical materials and insights from the fields of Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Sociology and Anthropology the course proposes to build an understanding of the concept of culture and its relation to the concepts of power and social formations. The focus on Modern India will be developed through an emphasis on caste and gender. In this the course addresses two issues: the shits and transformations in the cultural formations and their constituent agents and the representation of caste and gender in cultural forms, especially in music, theatre, other performance forms and literature. At another level the course aims to develop methods of ‘textual’ analysis as the primary mode of understanding cultural forms and using archival and ethnographic material as for enhanced understanding of textual analysis. The course will be divided into the following main units 1. Colonial period: Emergence of new cultural forms, issues in tradition and modernity, shifts in the agents of cultural forms, issues of appropriation and exclusion, processes of classicization, cultural nationalism and radical cultural movements. 2. Contemporary cultural formations: Issues in post colonial period, making of the nation and its problematization, emergence of identity formations, political and cultural resignification, feminist interventions and emergence of the studies of popular culture. The attempt will be to develop teaching units that juxtapose the contemporary with the past for developing an understanding of ‘tradition’, history, genealogy and the archive. The first two weeks of the course will focus on acquiring the skills for analyzing cultural practices and arriving at basic and working definitions of the three concepts in the title. After two weeks the course will require to watch/read or listen to a sample of a cultural practice and read theoretical and informative material to build an understanding of how studying cultural practices allow us to understand and study caste and gender in Modern India. Assessment Scheme This is a 3 credit course. Assessment of the course is divided as follows Assignments and participation: 1 credit (total 40%) This consists of Short class assignments such as response papers and assigned homework: 20% Participation in class: 5% Short term paper due two weeks after mid semester class test: 15% Mid –semester class test: 1 Credit (Total 25%) A sit down open book class test: 25% End of Semester Class Test: 1 Credit (Total 35%) A sit down open book class test requiring to analyze an unseen sample of a cultural practice: 35%

The course focuses on studying culture in Modern India. Drawing upon theoretical materials and insights from the fields of Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Sociology and Anthropology the course proposes to build an understanding of the concept of culture and its relation to the concepts of power and social formations. The focus on Modern India will be developed through an emphasis on caste and gender. In this the course addresses two issues: the shits and transformations in the cultural formations and their constituent agents and the representation of caste and gender in cultural forms, especially in music, theatre, other performance forms and literature. At another level the course aims to develop methods of ‘textual’ analysis as the primary mode of understanding cultural forms and using archival and ethnographic material as for enhanced understanding of textual analysis. The course will be divided into the following main units 1. Colonial period: Emergence of new cultural forms, issues in tradition and modernity, shifts in the agents of cultural forms, issues of appropriation and exclusion, processes of classicization, cultural nationalism and radical cultural movements. 2. Contemporary cultural formations: Issues in post colonial period, making of the nation and its problematization, emergence of identity formations, political and cultural resignification, feminist interventions and emergence of the studies of popular culture. The attempt will be to develop teaching units that juxtapose the contemporary with the past for developing an understanding of ‘tradition’, history, genealogy and the archive. The first two weeks of the course will focus on acquiring the skills for analyzing cultural practices and arriving at basic and working definitions of the three concepts in the title. After two weeks the course will require to watch/read or listen to a sample of a cultural practice and read theoretical and informative material to build an understanding of how studying cultural practices allow us to understand and study caste and gender in Modern India.

Undergraduate Thesis- part I

SOC 412 works with the distinction between theory, method and ethnography in the production of what we may term the anthropological object. 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. This course will enable and equip students to tease out the distinction or maybe the conflation of the three realms – theory, method and ethnography which informs the production of an anthropological object. This will be done with some amount of care and attention paid to texts, both theoretical and ethnographic, classical and contemporary.

Independent Studies in Sociology