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Literary Review
Beyond disciplines
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With a generous interpretation of sociology and ranging across disciplinary boundaries, The Oxford Companion, examines most vital issues that preoccupy social scientists today, says NEERA CHANDOKE.
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THIS mammoth two-volume work brings together essays that, ranging across disciplinary boundaries, touch upon nearly all of the vital issues that preoccupy social scientists on and in contemporary India. The contributions thus straddle a cross-disciplinary world, though, admittedly, many of the contributors remain more or less mired in their parent discipline. The volumes are arranged thematically around nine sections. Each of the sections is introduced by the editor who synopsises the main argument of the essays in the section. The first section is organised around the umbrella theme of "overarching concepts and categories", the second section is devoted to an exploration of "the ecological context of social life", the third section deals with "morphological categories", the fourth section consists of contributions to "the cultural landscape", in the fifth section the essays explore "perspectives on religion". "Education, knowledge, and human development" form the substance of the sixth section, the "personal sphere and its articulations" comprise the seventh section, the eighth and the ninth sections deal with "economic arrangements", and the essays in the final part concentrate on politics.
The discipline of sociology and social anthropology has obviously been interpreted rather generously by the editor — it comes to be identified with practically the whole of the social sciences. In turn, the discipline of sociology, recognises the editor, is not autonomous of other social and political processes. The precise site at which processes that may ostensibly seem independent of each other intersect and overlap, is also the site where particular disciplines emerge, and where they are re-configured in response to new discourses of power and administration.
Das does not recognise however, that this may also be the exact site where the insights of disciplines can be rendered redundant and irrelevant for public life. Disciplines need to be constantly monitored by their practitioners, they constantly need to be brought in touch with what is happening in public life. Intellectual fields, in other words, have to be reworked continuously, otherwise popular perceptions and disciplinary labours are separated all too easily. Take the case of Hindutva; how many theorists by the beginning or even the middle of the 1980s could predict that this particular ideology would prove to be the most important theme for theory and for theorists in roughly the two decades that followed the rise of majoritarianism? The failure by scholars to gauge the extent to which this ideology had permeated civil society in India, was as much a historical blunder as the failure of political observers to foresee the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989. Public life has an uncanny way of outstripping scholarly endeavours and outpourings. But that is another story.
To return to the work under review, Das, in the introduction, titled aptly enough "Social Sciences and the Publics", skilfully investigates the processes by which the discipline of sociology emerged as a specific field of intellectual inquiry. The legitimate questions for the practitioner of sociology, she suggests, are the following: how do new sites of knowledge emerge, how is the field of knowledge constructed by practices of administration, by discourses of governance, and by ideas of biomedicine, and how do postcolonial studies correct stereotypes and restore depth to theoretical formulations. In other words, she locates the practices of sociological knowledge in social and political processes. Rooting the origin of the discipline within the domain of colonial modernity, Das further reflects on the processes through which forms of knowledge about Indian society have been constituted: through the setting up of universities, research institutes, and colonial institutions for data collection, translation, enumeration, and the production of texts. In the postcolonial period, concern about the nation, the coming into being of funding agencies, the institutionalisation of area studies programmes in Western universities, and diasporic activities, were to influence the generation of and the hegemonisation of particular forms of knowledge.
Four features of the collection strike the reader particularly sharply. Firstly, though some authors try to maintain a fine balance between Western thinking on the subject at hand and the way it has been interpreted by Indian scholars in particular, and the postcolonial world in general, others remain stuck in Western debates and approach the debates on India and by Indian scholars only hesitantly and sparingly. Secondly, though the introduction by Veena Das raises many expectations about the way a particular theme will be approached, many of the authors belie these expectations. For instance, Das suggests that the Companion will show the close relation between political processes and social theory; many of the contributions however land up as statements on the main debates on the discipline, a summing up as it were.
Thirdly, as mentioned above, though concerns of economics or political science could have been treated as economic or political sociology by the authors, though the contributors could have adopted an inter-disciplinary perspective, this does not happen. This is particularly evident of the section on economics and politics; a merger of the two disciplinary boundaries just does not take place. Fourthly, though Das suggests in her introduction that the first decade of the new millennium will be an important decade of experimentation, not many authors raise questions about what should constitute the legitimate domain of social inquiry in the foreseeable future. Das's pointers to future domains of research, for instance that traditional emphasis on locally bounded fields be replaced by multi-sited ethnography, or that new forms of sociality will create new communities of interest and new notions of human nature, are not taken up by many of the contributors. This is of course a pity, for ultimately the collection, with some notable exceptions, remains a compilation.
Certainly the work under review is of tremendous significance, because in order to know where we are now, intellectually speaking, it is important to know where we have come from. But we also need to know where we are going. Perhaps this reluctance to chart out new domains of knowledge, which may be worth exploring, is in keeping with the current mood of intellectual insecurity. As Jonathan Spencer in his piece on violence points out, though sociologists and anthropologists know far more about collective violence today, they also acknowledge that "the best critical response to the place of violence in the certainties of communal rhetoric is a careful and sober reminder of our uncertainty, of the necessary limits of our knowledge of complex social and political phenomenon" (p.1579).
The value of this collection is that it maps out the field for scholars and potential scholars. They will come to know how themes that are of utmost significance for our collective life have been treated intellectually. And this gives them a hook upon which they can pin their own insights. The disadvantage is that it may lead to intellectual laziness, scholars and potential scholars can rest assured that they will come to know what X or Y has to say about Z if and when they read the work under review. They may in the process feel that no further intellectual labour is needed in the direction of, say, reading the original works themselves. Companions in other words can provide shortcuts to learning, whereas they should be, in principle, providing signposts, which guide the scholar when he or she transacts complex intellectual mazes. Still I would suggest that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages because the field has been mapped by intellectuals, some of whom possess impeccable credentials for innovation and meticulous handling of concepts. Veena Das is to be congratulated for this effort.
The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, edited by Veena Das, Oxford University Press, 2003, 2 volumes, vol 1, pp. 1-934, volume 2, pp 936-1660, Rs. 3750.
Neera Chandoke is Professor Political Science, Delhi University.
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