The goddess for development. Indigenous economic concepts among South Indian artisans* (original) (raw)
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Economic and Political Weekly People of India and Indian Anthropology
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.
Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies - August 2016
Not considered as a major tribe, the Paharias of Santal Parganas in Jharkhand have generally been a victim of scholarly neglect. The essay therefore attempts to present an overview of their socio-political organisation , as it developed up to the early British period. The essay also serves the collateral purpose of the transformation of a pre-state polity into a state system. Divided into three broad sections, the first section unfolds the specific ecological setting that had considerable influence on the Paharia socio-political organisation and the policies of the imperial forces. The second section covers roughly a history of more than two hundred years when the Mughals and British intervened and considerably changed Paharia socio-polity. The last section seeks to study how this intervention led to the formation of a hybrid socio-political organisation that considerably broke the isolation of the Paharias and joined them with the colonial political economy.
This article analyses some of Sarat Chandra Roy's writings on the Oraons that were for- mulated between 1915 and 1937 in order to point to the different shades of opinion that were reflected in his works as he sought to define, and redefine, his image of the Oraons and that of the 'tribe'. An anthropologist who had in the formative years internalised the precepts of British social anthropology and supported colonial intervention in Chhotanagpur, Roy became, towards the end of his career, one who deeply sympathised with the communities of Chhotanagpur as he advocated an 'Indian approach' to the study of anthropology. In a larger context, this article cautions one against an uncritical acceptance of anthropological representations, and suggests that an anthropologist and his writings need to be located within a historical context. A few months before his death, Sarat Chandra Roy confessed to his student, Nirmal Kumar Bose, that if given the chance, he would rework his earlier ethnographic accounts, concentrate on village units and local nuances, and thereby give a new orientation to his study of tribal culture.' His anthropology, which had overlooked Acknowledgements: Professor Gautam Bhadra introduced me to the records at the Man in India Office, Ranchi; Ms Meera Roy gave me the rare opportunity of consulting the private papers of Sarat Chandra Roy, her father; Mr Subrata Ray discussed the many faceted personality of his grandfather. For comments on this article, I thank Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya, Professor Gautam Bhadra, Professor Gyan Prakash (who as one of the examiners of my thesis made several suggestions on a chapter from which this article was developed), Sheena Panja and Padmanabh Samarendra. The anonymous reader from the IESHR thankfully forced me to once again review Roy's writings and considerably enlarged my reading list. Sohini Dasgupta and Uddalok Bhattacharya helped in editing an earlier version.
1994
The works of Malinowski, Mauss, Sahlins and Weiner form the bedrock of the study of economic principles applied within the framework of tribal societies. In attempting to arrive at a synthesis of their anthropological interpretations of tribal economic activities, the old substantivist-formalist debate emerges as a strawman confusing what are basically two perspectives — that of extensive ethnographic studies, such as of the Trobriand Islanders, and general ethnological theories of tribal economics. These two perspectives — ethnography and ethnology — the backbone of cultural anthropology, are traditionally viewed as distinct research paradigms that converge to form a definitive picture of a culture and elicit understanding of basic principles of subsistence and social organization characteristic of certain categories of cultural aggregates, as, for example, tribal societies. This paper is concerned with the rationale of such categorizations and with many of the assumptions inherent in the practice of cultural anthropology and economic anthropology stemming from the perceptions by which we describe and analyze discrete cultures and define specific universal principles that we apply to such categories of cultural entities. In ethnology, we extract activities and institutions from distinctive local cultural contexts and attach a general, nonlocal meaning to them from which we in turn construct parallels and analogies to understand and explain distinct local cultural contexts in a self-reinforcing circular logic. It is important to break this loop, step out of the circle, and reexamine the meanings that we have applied to these activities and institutions. This paper demonstrates how ethnographic studies — particularly in economic anthropology — are filtered through lenses of investigative bias, viewing different cultural patterns in terms of the basis and familiarity of our own cultural contexts, distorting the real meaning of the activities and institutions observed with respect to the only context that is relevant to such studies, the local culture under observation.
Book chapters, 2021
These are my two book chapters on Bhupendranath Datta and Tarak Chandra Das in a book edited by Sarthak Sengupta published in 2021. Both Datta and Das still remains neglected personalities in the curriculum of Indian anthropology. I wrote and spoke extensively on T.C.Das and his contributions in Indian anthropology and also on Bhupendranath Datta. Both these anthropologists were nationalists in the true sense of the term who looked at the problems of nation building in India from an Indian perspective.Datta studied caste system from the class angle while Das constructed ethnographies of individual tribes and the Bengal famine from applied anthropological perspective.
Indian Anthropology -Accuracy and Absurdity
Cross-Currents: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal on Humanities & Social Sciences, 2021
Anthropology in India is divided into various phases. In fact, postcolonial anthropology is itself an incoherent lot with diverse forms and ideas. In the long history of Indian anthropology, there appeared some works carrying theoretical bearing and applied relevance, yet some chroniclers (for instance an encyclopedia chapter by S. Deshpande; published by Hilary Callan, 2018), have undervalued such works. This article is partly a response to the said encyclopedia chapter which has ignored many foundational works of Indian anthropology. Placing this rejoinder in a larger historical context of colonial/ postcolonial anthropology, this author aims to focus attention on major signposts of social anthropology. The second objective is to dispel many myths and misconceptions which are planted in said encyclopedia chapter concerning Indian anthropology in general and about the anthropological survey of India, mainly its People of India study. Ultimately, by citing some ethnographic illustrations, this article endeavors to ascertain a tendency of “indigenousness” and demonstrate thereby the Swadeshi trend of Indian anthropology.
Historical Anthropology of Modern India
History Compass, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2007
The last three decades have seen acute interchanges between history and anthropology in theoretical and empirical studies. Scholarship on South Asia has reflected these patterns, but it has also reworked such tendencies. Here, significant writings of the 1960s and 1970s brought together processes of history and patterns of culture as part of mutual fields of analysis and description. These emphases have been critically developed more recently. Anthropologists and historians have rethought theory and method, in order not only to crucially conjoin but to explore anew the 'archive' and the 'field'. The blending has produced 'historical anthropology': writings that approach and explain in new ways elaborations of caste and community, colonialism and empire, nation and nationalism, domination and resistance, law and politics, myth and kingship, environment and ethnicity, and state and modernity -in the past and the present. Work in historical anthropology focuses on practice, process, and power, and often combines perspectives from gender, postcolonial, and subaltern 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.