Course Catalog

What is the relationship between seeing and knowing? Which image is visible and which image is hidden? How do we know what we see or rather who has the power to make something visible? Is seeing the same as an act of looking? How do we know or test the veracity of that which is seen? Can the visual replace the textual or the word? Is what we see always based on a sense of the tangible? These questions have been posed and addressed by philosophers and sociologists alike for more than half a century now. With the ubiquitous presence of social media and tiny hand held image making devices at our constant disposal, the line between life as lived and life as an image is increasingly getting blurred and hazy. Given this moment in the contemporary, understanding the world through the mode of the visual or what has been classically referred to as visual anthropology has gained tremendous theoretical and ethnographic interest. Stemming from this theoretical thrust this course would work with the basics of what may be termed the power of optics or the visual analytic in the doing of anthropology and demonstrate how this analytic can help concur the distinction and overlap between the real and the imagined, the material and the symbolic, the instrumental and the expressive. Using this analytic as a premise, the primary aim of this course is to translate and explain the discursive register of the visual and its significance for anthropological inquiry. While the analytic offered by the tactile, the aural, the olfactory and even the sense of taste can offer an equally significant trope of analysis, this course premises the order of the visual to decipher how representation in anthropology is produced by negotiating the powerful potential of the visual – both as a methodological promise and an epistemological frame. 

“Me, us and them: an invitation to sociological thinking,” is an introductory course for Sociology with a twin aim. The first aim of the course is to think about the interconnectedness between who we are as individuals and how we belong to a group as an individual. The second aim of the course is to inculcate a sociological orientation to think about the way the world functions and what is our role in this functioning of the world. Society – a commonly used term but rarely understood, defines our location as humans. We all claim to live in a society whether as the daughter of a mother, as an inhabitant of a city, as a citizen laying claims to a belonging or as an individual who rejects these binding categories that construct a notion of this “I”. This course will introduce students to these inherent dilemmas of life and living through two complementary strains of what sociological thinkers have framed as sociological perspective and sociological imagination.  Working with these two strands of thought, this course will encourage students to think about how “I” as a subject exists and how a sense of belonging constructs the notion of a “me” to an “us” and eventually a notion of “them” which indicates how we think of those who we consider are not like us. In broad terms this course will be divided along four defining registers of how an individual is constructed: Gender, Space, Ecology and Technology. What does it mean for us to define ourselves as a man or a woman or neither or both; how may we understand where we live; how the environment and the non-human is a distinct part of society and what role does technology play in constructing the subject “I”. In a nutshell, this course invites everyone to critically engage with who we are as people and how and why we live the way we do.

What are the ties that bind and the ties that tear? How do we make families, friendships and enemies? Indeed, how do ways of relating constitute ourselves and organise the world? This course takes up these questions through a combination of classical and contemporary studies of relatedness. Beginning with the classical trends in Sociology and Anthropology of kinship through the selections of works by scholars like A R Radcliffe-Brown, Evans Pritchard, Levi Strauss and Schneider, the course will offer selections from the works on new reproductive technologies, same sex marriage and adoption and other ways of family making. In the last segment, the course will address the formation of friendship and animosity through theoretical studies and ethnographies from the more recent times with the aim of introducing the students to emerging debates and deliberations on the changing notion of relatedness through new technologies of communication. The location of this course at Level three of the B A Research programme assumes an awareness of various forms of relatedness and sociality addressed through classical and contemporary theoretical works studied at the earlier levels. The notions of class, caste, race, ethnicity, nationality and gender can now come together into addressing specific methodologies employed in the sub-discipline of Sociology of Kinship and more recent ethnographies that grapple with the changing forms of sociality, and importantly offer a critique of the notion of sociality and suggest radical and ethical forms of sociability. At the end of the course students are expected to have been exposed to classical and contemporary methodologies through a bouquet of select ethnographies. The organization of the course materials aims to facilitate their entry into the methodology course Field Archive Ethnography and towards that end emphasizes reading and comprehension of the interlinkages between theoretical and methodological frames and writing genres and styles.

Religion has been a field of enduring enquiry within the disciplines of Sociology and Anthropology. This course will introduce students to both classical and contemporary sociological and anthropological analyses of the beliefs, practices, and phenomena understood to be ‘religious’. We will examine notions of the sacred, rituals, beliefs, and religious symbols that have been central to anthropological and sociological understandings of religion. We shall also examine the ways in which magic, witchcraft and religion have been studied together in terms of their points of continuity and departures. These discussions will lead us to a critique of studying religion simply in its own terms, taking us to notions of modernity and secularity as well, in order to understand iterations of the religious in national and transnational contexts. In 1968, sociologist Peter Berger, like many of his fellow American and European sociologists, predicted that by the 21st century religion will have declined considerably in the world (if not died) and religious believers would be found “huddled” in small sects. About thirty years later, Berger retracted his secularization thesis: religion was very much present and, according to many sociologists, had in fact seen a resurgence all over the world. What does this tell us about religion, and about the relation between the religious and the secular? What does it tell us about the ways in which religion and secularity have been understood within the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology, and how have these approaches changed over time? This course situates itself within such conceptualisations of the religious, and debates around it, in order to offer a complex understanding of the religious with reference to the modern and the secular, in addition to the topics and themes mentioned previously. By the end of the course, students are expected to be well versed with broad sociological and anthropological approaches to religion; be able to complicate supposed demarcations between the religious and the non-religious; and analyse current and popular contentions around the religious.

How do varied theoretical perspectives change understandings of how meaning making takes place in the world? Or, how does one kind of a theory give rise to another? This course will attempt to answer these questions by examining the contributions of structuralism, post- structuralism and two recent significant theoretical developments that have impacted the development of sociology and social anthropology. The main theoretical tenents of some scholars like Saussure, Barthes, Peirce, Levi Strauss’s will be examined to emphasize the development of structuralism as a paradigm that diminished the role of the individual subject or agent while highlighting the underlying structural relations that govern social and psychic practices. The transition to poststructualism will be taken up by positioning several theorists whose work arose as a distinct philosophical response to structuralism that are often positioned far apart, such as – habitus, field and strategy (Bourdieu); dialogic view on language (Bakhtin); relations of power, discourse, and the construction of the subject (Foucault); amongst others. In order to show some effects of this genealogy on contemporary sociology and social anthropology two developments will be taken up. The first is structuralisms influence in the analysis of Hinduism and Sikhism by India social anthropologists. The second, of two strands is structuralism and post-structuralisms effect on the analysis of sociological understandings of science. The intent of the course is to encourage a close reading of critical theory that continues to influence sociology and social anthropology.

Social theorists have examined how the institutions and practices that emerged with industrial production, technology, science, urbanization, and colonialism gave rise to new ways of being and new forms of malaise. The work of Karl Marx shows the different forms of alienation of the worker from his product with the expansion of capitalism and further how estrangement among people in bourgeois societies leads to a loss of humanity. For Emile Durkheim, the erosion of collective conscience led to anomie and individualism characterized by a lack of purpose, worthlessness, and despair. Disenchantment for Max Weber involved the eclipsing of supernatural accounts of the world that accompanied processes of rationalization. This course will focus on the ways in which people experience the various institutions and practices of modernity by examining the concepts of alienation, anomie, and disenchantment. The course will locate alienation, anomie, and disenchantment within the broader works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber respectively. These thinkers and their interlocutors employed and evolved philosophical thought and social science methods that enabled them to respond to the momentous changes in Europe and develop perspectives on the human condition. The course will situate the work of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in their specific historical and cultural context and trace the prevailing intellectual genealogies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With a close reading of some of the key texts of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, the course will provide the foundations that will enable students to pursue social and anthropological theory in other courses. Students would have also developed analytical perspectives to understand modern malaise and modes of individuation with which they could further investigate the rise of intolerance, dispossession, climate change, and technology in contemporary contexts.

Course description not available.

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