Course Catalog

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.

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.   

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.

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%

“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.

Independent Studies

Objects , Codes, Techniques