Sociology

Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

This article explores the ways in which long-term western spiritual practitioners settled in Puducherry, India reconstruct their selves as "connected" to the divine, the guru, and India through notions of "karma," "calling," and "surrendering." Current work on spirituality takes an either/or approach to spirituality and the self-either the self-oriented quest for metaphysical meaning-making is seen to be consumerist and individualistic, or it is seen to be experiential and ethical. Further, scholars on either side of the divide agree that contemporary spiritualities are primarily self-oriented, with one camp arguing that such self-orientation is consumerist and selfish versus the other arguing that such self-orientation challenges modern consumerism and can be an ethical alternative to consumerism. By contrast, I argue that contemporary spiritualities demonstrate the ways in which individualist, self-oriented experimentation with, and even consumption of, other religious ideas and practices is intertwined with attempts to go beyond the atomistic self. © 2018 The Author(s).

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Connecting their selves: The discourse of Karma, calling, and surrendering among western spiritual practitioners in India

World University root node

The Politics of Custom

Tourism and Ethnodevelopment: Inclusion, Empowerment and Self-determination

Exotic tourists, ethnic hosts: A critical approach to tourism and ethnodevelopment

American Anthropologist

Academic Freedom and the Future of Anthropology in India

Book Review: Roma Chatterji, ed. 2015. Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Despite widespread global efforts to promote clean cookstoves to achieve improvements in air and forest quality, and to reduce global climate change, surprisingly little is known about the degree to which these actually reduce biomass fuel consumption in real-world settings. Using data from in-house weighing of fuel conducted in rural India, we examine the impact of cleaner cookstoves - most of which are LPG stoves - on three key outcomes related to solid fuel use. Our results suggest that using a clean cookstove is associated with daily reductions of about 4.5. kg of biomass fuel, 160 fewer minutes cooking on traditional stoves, and 105 fewer minutes collecting biomass fuels. These findings of substantial savings are robust to the use of estimators with varying levels of control for selection, and to alternative data obtained from household self-reports. Our results support the idea that efforts to promote clean stoves among poor rural households can reduce solid fuel use and cooking time, and that rebound effects toward greater amounts of cooking on multiple stoves are not sufficient to eliminate these gains. We also find, however, that households who have greater wealth, fewer members, are in less marginalized groups, and practice other health-averting behaviors, are more likely to use these cleaner stoves, which suggests that socio-economic status plays an important role in determining who benefits from such technologies. Future efforts to capture social benefits must therefore consider how to promote the use of alternative technologies by poor households, given that these households are least likely to own clean stoves. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Resource and Energy Economics

How much do alternative cookstoves reduce biomass fuel use? Evidence from North India

The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the ‘dead’ rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-à-vis the dead. I show how, unlike the anthropology of death that very often reiterates communitarian restoration (pravah), an anthropology of the dead may haltingly resist such reading and seek a continual searching of the indefinite social (parvah). © 2016, © 2016 SAGE Publications.

Many lives of the dead in Banaras: Towards an anthropology of the indefinite social

Book Review: Roma Chatterji, Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Traditions in India. 2012.

Society and Culture in South Asia

An anthropological study on judicial practices in South Asia, this volume takes criminal cases as frameworks to examine power dynamics within a legal setting. Case studies in this book analyse a set of state and non-state institutions and the practices of people associated with them. The essays delve into the underlying tension in institutional contexts between legal practitioners such as police officers, lawyers and judges who orient their claims towards neutralism, objectivity and equality and a set of everyday interactions and decisions where cultural, social and political factors play a major role. This volume is based on the premise that the study of judiciary cases, in all their multifaceted complexity, provides a pertinent and original angle from which to access some issues of South Asia. The chapters examine the discourses and relationships around criminal cases that shape how ideas circulate in the public sphere and how mediation and negotiation between different actors characterize police and court practices.

Regime of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia

A persistent concern of social anthropology of death has been to map dying and death within the meaningful matrices of myth, ritual actions and communitarian regeneration. This article embedded within the said legacy, departs from the convention in minor ways. It seeks to locate the agency of the dead as a specific kind of subject–object, focusing on the newly dead rather than on the dying and the fresh ancestors. The newly dead are those for whom the transition from the material–spectral state into a new embodiment must be observed through the proper processing of the dead. The article maps this realm of the newly dead in relation to the institutional practice of cremation in Denmark, Europe. The entry into the ethnographic understanding of the Danish context is informed by my previous fieldwork on the subject of cremation at Banaras, India. This article mainly borrows from my fieldwork at Aarhus, while Banaras serves as an alert backdrop. The specific object of enquiry that guided my research in Aarhus was to locate the controversial initiative to redirect the heat generated during the cremation process, for civil, municipal use. Locating the controversy, I argue, enables one to address the nature of institutional imaginaries involved in the processing of the newly dead. It further helps us to show how these imaginaries persist within a multiplicity of shifts such as new scientific inventions, Nazi use of cremation techniques, aestheticisation of funerary objects and the availability of commercial merchandise as funerary objects. In the ethnographic contextualisation of this multiplicity, the emphasis is on highlighting both the imaginaries of the proper processing of the dead and the doing of the proper. In this regard, the article poses the question: Is there any link between the myth and the proper observance of funerary procedures? It argues that the biblical version of singularity appears integral to the institutional imaginary of processing of the newly dead in Aarhus, just as scientific vision and communitarian sentiments are constitutive of it.