Sociology

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In this article, I examine the ways in which ideas of martyrdom are employed by Gujjars in Rajasthan to describe their experiences of participating in the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protest), serving in the army, and in their telling of the Devnarayan epic. I take as a starting point the manner in which the bodies of Gujjars killed in police firing during the andolan were laid out for 17 days at the site of the andolan while Gujjar men and women recited the Devnarayan epic. The laying out of the martyred bodies then becomes a site for the production of caste belonging and caste love. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Contributions to Indian Sociology

The theopolitics of protest: Martyrdom in the Gujjar Andolan, the army and the epic

Yasmeen Arif’s speculative essay scrutinises the temporal frame of the contemporary to outline the sets of responses to the question of scientific method in the social sciences. An important entry point for Arif is the recent ‘shifts’ in sociology/social anthropology towards the study of conventionally ‘objective’ realms. She problematises the simplistic binary between scientificity and subjectivity, since the question of method in sociology/social anthropology cannot be posed in these limited and pregiven range of responses. She points out right at the outset that the dividing lines between positivism, empiricism, objectivity, and arguments of reliability and validity, on the one hand, and intricacies of narrative structure, subjectivity, authenticity, plurality, representation, languages, and modes of writing on the other are increasingly blurred. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Gita Chadha and Renny Thomas.

Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations

BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL: Speculations on the Indian Contemporary

As we live and die through the continuing pandemic, one particular affect that relates us globally is of the dead awaiting their funerary repose. Assessing the pandemic, Arif (2020) in an early reflection proposes that we might benefit in our assessment of the ‘bio-social’ of the pandemic by admitting to the sovereignty of the virus. Borrowing this premise, I suggest further that the sovereignty of the virus is acutely manifested in the commingled presence of the living and unreposed dead in the temporary, improvised morgues. Although the continuing pandemic is quite unprecedented, it can be partially recognised in knowledges gained in mourning that register how disasters force a ‘descent’ (Das 2006) and ‘fall’ (Rosaldo 2014) into accepting improvisation of life and death forms. This descent and fall can be towards an abyss risking the very continuum of life, but what we also gain from discerning the relation of mourning with knowledge is that life can be regained at many levels of the fall. Just as the unreposed dead manifest the sovereignty of the virus, I suggest this descent and fall can be ethically attested in improvisation as the social surface of regaining life. It is my contention that this full-time improvisation, which in turn must be its own source, energy and end, must operate facing the unreposed dead. Deriving and extending from my own work of studying the dead, the present essay shows this improvisation and regaining of life through two brief assemblages of bacteriophage virus and media morgue. The relation of mourning and knowledge is built through the essay to arrive at the conclusion that the classic trope of life cycle in anthropology has to be seen as part of a complex texture of the social where vitality and the unreposed dead are concurrent and overlapping. &nbsp;

Fulltext

Society and Culture in South Asia

COVID-19: Mourning, Knowledge and Improvisation

A reflection piece on travelling, testing and quarantine during the pandemic.&nbsp;

The Unwittingly Wilful State Subject: Travelling and Testing in the Terrain of Threat

In 1995, a multimillion-dollar experiment – the Indian Ocean Experiment – discovered a dark mass of polluting air hovering above the Indian subcontinent. This mass of air was termed a cloud and found to be composed of a high amount of black carbon that was judged to be the second biggest threat to climate change after carbon-dioxide. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the life of black carbon by documenting its changing forms since the experiment. It emerges that the changing forms allow for the movement of air – smoke from traditional cookstoves and vehicular diesel emissions in India lead to the formation of the cloud – and reveal how an ethnography of air can be undertaken. © The Author(s) 2021.

Journal of Material Culture

Hazy clouds: Making black carbon visible in climate science

Nomadic Peoples

Communications from the field: The tale of two gujjar communities

Induismo e cremazione. Altri addii (Other Goodbyes) Ana Cristina VargasINTERVISTARavi Nandan Singh

SOCREM NEWS

Induismo e cremazione. Altri addii (Other Goodbyes)

Improved cookstoves (ICS) can deliver “triple wins” by improving household health, local environments, and global climate. Yet their potential is in doubt because of low and slow diffusion, likely because of constraints imposed by differences in culture, geography, institutions, and missing markets. We offer insights about this challenge based on a multiyear, multiphase study with nearly 1,000 households in the Indian Himalayas. In phase I, we combined desk reviews, simulations, and focus groups to diagnose barriers to ICS adoption. In phase II, we implemented a set of pilots to simulate a mature market and designed an intervention that upgraded the supply chain (combining marketing and home delivery), provided rebates and financing to lower income and liquidity constraints, and allowed households a choice among ICS. In phase III, we used findings from these pilots to implement a field experiment to rigorously test whether this combination of upgraded supply and demand promotion stimulates adoption. The experiment showed that, compared with zero purchase in control villages, over half of intervention households bought an ICS, although demand was highly price-sensitive. Demand was at least twice as high for electric stoves relative to biomass ICS. Even among households that received a negligible price discount, the upgraded supply chain alone induced a 28 percentage-point increase in ICS ownership. Although the bundled intervention is resource-intensive, the full costs are lower than the social benefits of ICS promotion. Our findings suggest that market analysis, robust supply chains, and price discounts are critical for ICS diffusion. © 2019 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Experimental evidence on promotion of electric and improved biomass cookstoves

This conversation attempts to critically map out the field of sociology/anthropology of religion as it is practised in select institutions of learning in India. The focus is not merely on the classical works in the field but also on classroom practices. In particular, it engages with the ways in which the canonical works in the field have been articulated through multiple pedagogic forms and institutional sites. © 2019 SAGE Publications.

Journal of Human Values

Sociology of Religion Today: Practices of Thought and Learning

For decades, scholars have emphasized the power of the Western tourist gaze to construct Third World destinations as the ‘Exotic Other'. Scholars have also shown that ‘Third World’ tourism fuelled by media fantasies of the Other represents neo-colonization in the twenty-first century. However, considering all its intentions/claims of impartiality, tourism research has generally travelled in only one direction (from the West to the East). In this study, conducted in Goa and Puducherry, focusing on the social contexts in which people are viewed and photographed, we ask–what do the ‘Third World’ people think of Westerners gazing at them, and their surroundings? How do Western tourists react when photographed by domestic tourists? What are the power relations within which the photographer and the photographed are located? We recognize that no simplistic analyses are possible in the postcolonial context. Directing a critical lens at the tourist gaze, this essay moves from an understanding of the gaze as appropriating to that of the gaze as negotiated. © 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.