CATEGORIES
Ethnography & Empirical Data
Ethnographic Interview (Selections from Spradley?)
Participant Observation (Selections from Spradley?)
Example: Life History (Dorothy Lee), Geertz (Interpretation of Cultures), That Ethnography on Texas Working Class and Schools (??)
Debates: Marcus and Clifford etc.
Archival Research, Hermeneutics, & Textual Data
Historical Research: An Outline of Theory and Practice
Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Not for class, but for me) 
Historiography in the twentieth century (Not for class, but for me)
The historic turn in human sciences (Not for class, but for me)
Hayden White, Metahistory
Examples: Lincoln at Gettysburg (?), People’s History of America (?), Other examples from America?
Philology/Translation (?)
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Not for class, but for me)
Filed under: Ethnography, Historiography, Philology, Studying Human Experience, Translation | Leave a Comment
Essay Forum on Public Sphere
This essay forum strives to build an integrative discussion for what is a fragmented interdisciplinary field of study on the public sphere. It is meant to accompany a mapping project we are calling the Public Sphere Guide and is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The forum provides a platform for discussions around current or emerging projects in this area and serves as a gateway to ongoing conversations around sub-themes that have resulted in other stand-alone forums or blogs at the SSRC.Essay Forum on Public Sphere
http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/
Filed under: Keywords, Public Sphere | Leave a Comment
1) what does speaking of the processes of publicity in terms of a counter public hide and reveal? what of gramsci’s subalterns: what does that hide or reveal? which provides a better vocabulary and what does that vocabulary help us understand? aren’t we still speaking of older forms (or, marginalized forms) of association and their relationship to newer forms of associations? need we more words?
1) a. fraser’s vocabulary focusses on group identity though it gets caught up in the spatializing aspects of the public sphere theory. the best she has to offer on the questions of justice is some mixture of socialism and deconstruction. it’s not a complete idea and lacks many definitions. might we be better of focussing on the modes of publicity? here one can utilize her argument to show how modes are constitutive of the politics of language/identity and economic access.
2) rise of a form of legitimacy and its processes is what we are speaking of. how do the turns taken by dewey and de certeau help to resolve the problems that typify group identity and its relationship to the State? why do i intuitively prefer them over most others?
2) a. with dewey its clear taht he helps to declutter the conversation on the topic and i agree with most of what he says and could attempt to exaplin it. with de certeau, the best i have to say is that he brings our attention make to dspositions, habits, dailyness and does so from a rhetorical standpoint.
3) i haven’t read habermas in a while so he is missing here along with mr. weber. does anyone else matter to me in this conversation?
Filed under: Dewey, Fraser, Legitimacy, Modalities, Publicity, de Certeau | Leave a Comment
Nancy Fraser’s imagination…
…likes to read things and isolate ideas from them, impress an idealized version of those ideas in her minds in antithetical categories and, then, argue against them. I wonder what consequences that has for the social theory she builds. It’s just not very nuanced. Also, she thinks in pairs like most sociologists.
Filed under: Nancy Fraser, Social Theorists' Imagination | Leave a Comment
recognition redistribution
i am reading fraser again to incorporate parts of her argument in the first chapter on the relationship between class and other forms of identity in building a social movement. thus far, i have these issues with her argument:
1a. its not clear what she understands by class. is it a particular social category which got sedemented with the advent and crystallization of capitalism that was identified in social theory after marx? or, does class obscure other socio-poltical relations some of which spill into identity politics? are we speaking of old wines in new bottles? that is, in speaking of class and its relationship to other markers and forms of social organization, what is getting lost? habermas’s structural transformation is still a better book in this regard.
1b. she does say that she is creating a heuristic distinction between class and identity politics, one that doesn’t exist between “cultural and political economy” (p. 12) in the real world, at the outset in order to understand the problem of justice in our present time. i am not sure that she will be able to do this because her so called analytic categories are ill defined and founded.
2. she only understands class and its constructions in a particular context, that is, the west. not her fault/problem, i understand, even though she seems to be making a general case. but in india, what does speaking of class entail?
Filed under: Class, Indian Left, Indian historiography, Labor, Sacred/Secular, Unit 1, What is the political? | Leave a Comment
democratic centralism
What does democratic centralism mean to the CPI(M)?
Filed under: Leninist | Leave a Comment
Incommensurability
Perhaps the problem that I am facing towards the middle, and leading up to the end, of the dissertation in trying to connect two ideas might be a problem of incommensurability. The idea of democratic centralism as a way of organizing is integral to the project because the SMO (social movement organization) I am working with has clearly adopted the Leninst style of organizing from the Communist Party to which it is affiliated. However, de Certeau’s ideas aren’t integral to this case. They sort of help me think through how SMOs work much better than “democratic centralism” does. But that isn’t this project and hence must be left for exploration in a different paper/ project.
Hence, disentangling is good. With me a part of the problem of writing clearly requires disentangling my messy brain. Yowzers! For this project, it’s going to be let’s think through this movement between ideology and structure (that is, organizing) using the case and the vocabulary of democratic centralism and what it stands to mean in this context. Period.
But…
I also end up wondering how do anthropologists do this movement(!)/dance between different frames/vocabularies of thinking in their writing? What am I missing? Both de Certeau’s framework and the language of democratic centralism give us a way of thinking about the relationship between ideology and structure (i. e., organizing). Some answers could be: (1) They are thinking at two different times about this relationship (2) They are addressing two different concerns about the movement- one seems to be focused more on the vanguard and its ideology, the other on “masses,” for lack of a better term, and their insertions into the ideology. But they both of them seem to help me understand and describe the SMO I am engaging with, which is why I can’t give either one up.
Well, I guess I’ll just go back to writing and hope for things to work themselves out. Because the most annoying thing would be to say that these two ideas come from two sociologically different paradigms and leave it at that. Shouldn’t be able to, using my case, do something about that exact incommensurability, whatever it entails! Why else did I sweat it out in the fucking field?! What’s the point of collecting any evidence/experience/data?
Filed under: Work, Writing | 2 Comments
Wilting down
After, months of writing, not writing, redrafting, brooding here’s what I have to say:
Chapter 1: Tackles Nancy Fraser’s argument about the relationship between recognition and redistribution with examples from the Indian social movement organization I am studying. It shows the difficulty of building a working class women’s movement in the face of religious, caste, and ethnic diversity of India.
Chapter 2: Takes on arguments about the relationship of class to gender by providing an overview of the tumultuous relationship between class and gender and other markers of identity through four phases of the Indian women’s movement. It’s the history of movement chapter which ends up arguing that class needs to be recognized as one of master narratuves of the Indian women’s movements. Scholars of the movemnet often recognize religion as one the master narratives but sideline class.
Chapter 3: Takes on Leninst notions of linking ideology to structure in the building of a movement. The organization I am studying borrowed this from the CPI(M) whose “women wing” it is. This chapter is on the structuring of a social movement organization and ends up showing the problems that exist in applying the idea of “democracy in discussion, unity in action” to real politics in this organization.
Chapter 4, 5, 6: Continues this link developed on Chapter 3 between ideology and structure to talk of it in three ways: Time, Space, and Body (TSB). In each of these chapters the movement between rhetorical notions of Time, Space, Body to their habitual, physical notions is mapped to show how a MOVEMENT works.. This is done through examples which almost end up providing a strengths and weaknesses type illustration of building a unified working class women’s movement in the face of India’s identity politics.
Chapter 7: I iz brain dead. Some things I could say: (1) TSB framework of modalities is better for understadning social movements because it helps to link the discursive to the structural, makes connections between the micro and macro processes (Michel de Certeau’s argument) (2) I could also say that in india’s case we see how the struggle for women’s identity needs to be tied to notions of women’s work (class politics) rather than to the politics community, state or nation (Nussbaum, Rajeshwari SundarRajan’s argument). (3) I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FUSE THESE TWO IDEAS. WHY?
Filed under: Class, Gender, Indian Left, Keywords, Last Chapter, Leninist, Modalities, Outline, Preface, Unit 1, Unit 3 | Leave a Comment
Dear Visitor
Thank you for visiting. I am busy updating other aspects of my life. Will return shortly. Please visit again.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
AIDWA In News
- AIDWA demands departmental action against PGI doctor - Times of India
- MNS attack on Azmi condemned - Times of India
- Domestic workers take out rally, seek Bharti's arrest - Times of India
- Teams dispatched in search of absconding doctor - Times of India
- Unwilling to act - The Hindu
- None to notice their plight - Times of India
- Oust-Dinakaran drive takes violent turn in Karnataka HC - Daily Pioneer
- When Justice Gowda refused to rise for the national anthem - Pune Mirror
