Cultural Anthropology & Other Essays N K Bose uploaded by Abhijit Guha

Over the last sixty-five years, since the country's independence, trained anthropologists have conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India. In this time span, anthropological discourses about Indian society have developed their own specificity, while at the same time the anthropology of India has also had a profound impact on the discipline as a whole. This paper provides a critical overview of the general theoretical perspectives that have been employed by these anthropologists and that have been developed on the basis of their ethnographic experiences. In allusion to Ortner (1995), this paper is a plea for " ethnographic approval " in devising theoretical perspectives. It is argued that anthropological theorizing loses its heuristic value (i.e., the ability to help investigate, understand, analyze and compare the particular sociocultural life worlds of humans) when it abandons the dialogue with ethnographic reality.

Article, 2022

Anthropology departments in India not only lack their own histories but they also do not have their anthropology. The departmental reunions, organised by the students provide opportune occasions not only for the union of the old and new hearts and minds for the exchange of ideas which once inspired the old but it also challenges the old to encounter the ones that is shaking the young minds at present. For a veteran anthropologist reunion in the department is a cultural event to see one’s self from a historical perspective. I am, therefore, fortunate enough that the students and the teachers of the department of anthropology invited me to write a history of this department in which I worked as a teacher for thirty years since its inception in 1985. My point of departure lay in viewing the physical and the cultural space named ‘University campus’ by situating the case study of Vidyasagar University in a theoretical and global context.So, campus anthropology and study of land grab which came accidentally in my anthropological journey have an underlying unity and that is the essence of this memoir.

McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. https://vk.com/ethnograph instagram.com/ethno_graphy

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Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 24 (Jun. 10-16, 2000), pp. 1998-2002, 2000

There is need of a rigorous and comprehensive history of Indian sociology-anthropology, constituted as a full-fledged research area, to study the material, ideological and institutional context in which these disciplines developed. A report on a national workshop on the issue.

Article, 2018

Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general, "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, postcoloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically, physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly anthropometry.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCHES AND STUDIES (ARS), 2018

Domains: bio-medical anthropology: auxology, behavioral ecology, epidemiology, nutrition, physical activity, sport, sexual-reproductive health, population biology, psychology, psychiatry, etc. socio-cultural anthropology: topics based on the behavioral categories (economic, political, linguistic etc.), on human relations (gender, family, nation, etc.), on values (ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc.), as well as on methodology.

Instructor: Prof. Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera Office: 303 Silsby Hall Office Hours: M 3-5 and by appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION The goal of cultural anthropology is to understand human diversity in all its various manifestations around the world. Cultural anthropologists are interested in how societies and cultures work – how people in different places adapt to their environment, the various symbolic systems they use to communicate with each other, the political and religious systems that regulate their lives, the ways families are structured, and the ways they make a living. During this class we will learn about people's practices around the world, both to broaden our understanding of how culture structures and patterns the lives of different groups, and to gain a better understanding of ourselves. In an increasingly global world, we need to know who our neighbors are – and what our neighbors see when they look at us. We will begin by looking closely at the concept of culture as the central theme in anthropology, and how culture patterns human behavior. We will explore various aspects of life – including our perceptions of time and space, race, gender, marriage, sexuality, and family – to uncover how what we assume to be natural ways of living are made meaningful and are given value through culture. We will also look at the historical development of social and economic systems, the role of language in culture, and various systems of political power. We will conclude by looking at globalization, the lingering effects of colonialism on power relations across the globe, and we will critically examine projects of international development.

Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology.Volume 15, No. 1. , 2018

Anthropology in India is divided into various phases and located at various levels. Despite a long ethnographic tradition, there is hardly any notion reflecting 'Indianness'. This is not to undermine however, numerous laudable works of Indian scholars. Sadly, some works, despite their contemporary theoretical relevance, remained unnoticed. Included among these are numerous noteworthy ethnographic monographs produced by Indian universities and anthropological survey of India (ASI), which are not assessed appropriately. This article briefly elucidates some such works, which have both theoretical bearing and applied relevance. It is argued that there is need for a holistic appraisal of anthropological works including works of applied nature. This is specially so because, in the absence of knowledge about numerous admirable works, critiques seem to be too unkind towards entire Indian anthropology. In Indian anthropology the growth of ethnography itself is a fascinating subject. This article discusses relevance of ethnography in India, historically. It also discusses the 'ethnographic' uniqueness of people of India study in postcolonial era which suffers from misinformation campaigns. Lastly it is argued that anthropologists need to ensure best utility of their research. There are limits and they have to decide how far to advocate politically, balancing wisely between ethnographic pragmatism and political activism.

An Indian Outlook on Anthropology

The objective methods of investigation of cultural data have to be helped out, not only by historical imagination and a background of historical and geographical facts, but also by a subjective process of self-forgetting absorption or meditation (dhyana), and intuition born of sympathetic immersion in, and self-identification with, the society under investigation. The spread of this attitude by means of anthropological study can surely be a factor helping forward the large unity-in-diversity-through-sympathy that seems to an Indian mind to be the inner meaning of the process of human evolution, and the hope of a world perplexed by a multitude of new and violent contacts, notably between Eastern and Western civilizations.

Through an assessment of the " People of India " project, this article pays homage to the late K S Singh who made a pioneering contribution to Indian anthropology. Besides the enormous output of his work, he was gifted with an exceptional ability, fertile imagination, the courage to go against prevailing opinion and the fortitude to bear vicious attacks by peers and critics alike.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCHES AND STUDIES, 2021

ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCHES AND STUDIES

Saurabh Dube (ed.), Historical Anthropology (Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv + 427 pp. Notes, index. `595 (hardback). DOI: 10.1177/006996671004400314 At the very first glance, Saurabh Dube’s volume tells us that on offer here is a very unusual mix of essays under the rubric of ‘historical Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at COLEGIO DE MEXICO BIBL on January 30, 2015 432 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 44, 3 (2010): 425–466 anthropology’. Clearly, much thought has gone into the choice of what is ‘representative’ of the field and why. Indeed, by his very choice of essays, Dube has effectively told the complex story of how, through time, an interdisciplinary domain is produced by a variety of academic practitioners, sometimes consciously, sometimes in spite of themselves.

2018

This book includes the abstracts of all the papers presented at the 4th Annual International Conference on Anthropology (18-21 June 2018), organized by the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER).

Anthropology in India has a history of two centuries starting from 1774 AD with the establishment of The Asiatic society of Bengal which marks the beginning of a scientific tradition in India for the study of “nature and man”(Vidyarthi 1976,4). But Anthropology as academic discipline started 100 years ago with the establishment of first Anthropology department at Culcutta University in 1921. Assessing the development of anthropology in India Vidyarthi (1966) puts it into three phases namely formative(1774 -1919); constructive (1920-1949);and analytical(1950 –onwards) . Surjit Sinha (1968) lends support to Vidyaarthi’s above three distinctive historical phases of development of Anthropology in India.