sociology | Humanities & Social Sciences

sociology

Complementarities in CSO Collaborations

A commonly explored theme in international civil society organisation (CSO) collaborations is the dominance of Northern CSOs and how this impinges on Southern CSOs’ autonomy, but there is little work on the relative importance of different collaborations for Southern CSOs. This study examined complementarity as a new approach to understanding CSO collaboration. Seeking Southern perspectives, we examined the case of CSOs working on disaster risk reduction in India and developed a typology of complementarities in this domain.

Caste

This article discusses the transformation of caste in the Indian context. The article starts with a discussion of the Indological and anthropological accounts of caste and then examines whether “caste” is essentially unique to Hinduism. Furthermore, the article discusses the possibility of mobility within the ritual hierarchy of caste.

Matrimonial

The business of matchmaking, performed in open market matrimonial negotiations, has not just helped brides and grooms find their ‘perfect match’, ‘soulmate’, ‘right person’, ‘life partner’, ‘true happiness’, and so on, they have also helped strengthen the ‘community’ through what Dumont called ‘endo-recruiting’. The modernity of matrimonials has reinvented the traditional marriage system, combined the best of both love and arranged marriage, and provided ‘individual’ as well as ‘social’ compatibility to candidates and their families.

Market Liberalism, Marginalised Citizens and Countermovements in India

How has neo-liberalism transformed the economic structure and policies of India? And what are the politico-economic implications of such policies for marginalised populations? Following Karl Polanyi’s theory of “double movement”, this paper argues that while market liberalism has helped India overcome the slow so-called “Hindu rate of growth”, it has adversely affected the economic interests of the poor. It further argues that the expansion of the market (first movement) has led to various social dislocations in the lives of the poor.

Multiple Publics

The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi organized a two day workshop on Multiple Publics: Sites, Boundaries and Contestations in India during 9-10 October 2010. The workshop was coordinated by Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo and Dr. Naveen K. Thayyil. The financial support for the workshop was provided by QIP/CEP (IIT Delhi) and ICSSR (Northern Regional Centre).

In Conversation with Hans Joas

Interviewed by Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo

Hans Joas, a German sociologist and social theorist, is Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg, Germany and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he also belongs to the influential interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought. In conversation with Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo, Joas explains how he got into the discipline of Sociology and what has motivated him all these years.

Intimate gifts and ‘bad’ deaths: Reflections on organ transplants, state and society in Gujarat

Discursive strategies around organ donation in India, as elsewhere, are bio-medical as well as religio-moral in nature. Given that cadaver transplants remain a largely untapped resource in India, this paper is concerned with the relative medical success and social acceptance of this mode of transplant among certain communities in contemporary Gujarat. Why is Gujarat a privileged site for this ethnography?
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