Society and politics are subjects of continuous and animated discussion in contemporary India. The essays brought together in this collection were written or published between 1964 and 1990. In this case it was also a period of many changes in the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology, as well as in the social and political environment.
André Béteille’s memoir, spanning his childhood, his schooldays and his early years as a sociologist, encompasses many worlds—that of colonial Chandannagar, where he spent his early years; of Patna and Calcutta, where he went to Englishmedium as well as Bengali-medium schools; and of his college days, where he started off as a physicist and then turned to sociology—a fi eld in which he was to win international renown. There are unforgettable descriptions of his colonial childhood and his two grandmothers, one French and the other Bengali; and of momentous events he lived through such as famine, communal riots and Partition. Equally compelling are his portraits of family members, his neighbourhood, school friends, teachers and Calcutta’s intellectual stars, among them Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. With its lucid and eloquent prose infused with acute sociological observations and insights into family relationships, childhood and adolescence, caste, class and community, this is a book that illumines the evolution of a brilliant teacher and scholar, even as it deepens our understanding of universal human dilemmas and desires.
This volume discusses the predicament of the universities today, the objectives with which they were set up, and the extent to which they have remained true to these goals.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.
Society and politics are subjects of continuous and animated discussion in contemporary India. The essays brought together in this collection were written or published between 1964 and 1990. In this case it was also a period of many changes in the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology, as well as in the social and political environment.
André Béteille’s memoir, spanning his childhood, his schooldays and his early years as a sociologist, encompasses many worlds—that of colonial Chandannagar, where he spent his early years; of Patna and Calcutta, where he went to Englishmedium as well as Bengali-medium schools; and of his college days, where he started off as a physicist and then turned to sociology—a fi eld in which he was to win international renown. There are unforgettable descriptions of his colonial childhood and his two grandmothers, one French and the other Bengali; and of momentous events he lived through such as famine, communal riots and Partition. Equally compelling are his portraits of family members, his neighbourhood, school friends, teachers and Calcutta’s intellectual stars, among them Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. With its lucid and eloquent prose infused with acute sociological observations and insights into family relationships, childhood and adolescence, caste, class and community, this is a book that illumines the evolution of a brilliant teacher and scholar, even as it deepens our understanding of universal human dilemmas and desires.
The issue of race is often a scab Americans choose to ignore. However social science has a responsibility and an obligation to examine not simply the amenable subjects but also the controversial. This work, in a word, is controversial. Thomas Franks (2004) argued that cultural differences led white Kansans to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the 1980s. He specifically argued that abortion was the unifying issue in this ideological migration. Simultaneously, future President Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the sight of the massacre of four young civil rights activists over a decade earlier. Race has and is a factor in the American experience; Franks’ premise is simply that the absence of the concentration of African Americans in the Kansas area negated the influence of the “black threat hypothesis” on the observed ideological switch of white Kansans. This work argues that Franks’ premise fails to incorporate the over arching ideological switch of white voter migration to the Republican party that was occurring during the same period, and that Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was an overt cue that he was rejecting the civil rights consensus for an historically established “race-based social contract” that positioned people of color outside the traditional bounds of the social contract. The study is a sociopolitical analysis of the African American experience utilizing the “racial contract” framework developed by Charles Mills. The “racial contract” holds that the social contract explicitly dictates interactions and transaction costs between citizens and government. Mills supposition is that historically non-Western Europeans were excluded from the penalties for violations of the social contract, and a tacit race based contract dictated transaction costs and interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. The work utilizes the framework to trace the sociopolitical environment from the first appearance of Africans in America to the present. It has the supposition that the initial sociopolitical status of Africans in America was as a result of the reformation of the Western feudal agrarian culture, with African captives attached to the land as the neo-serfs; but that the reformation of feudalism was only possible within the context that Africans were implicitly viewed as outside the bounds of the codified social contract. It traces American sociopolitical conflict over the expansion of the “racial contract,” which was the basis of the American Civil War; and the establishment of an implicit sociopolitical order within the bounds of the racial contract at the end of the Civil War, with codified sanctions for violations of commensality and endogamy.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.