Image: Courtesy of Dev N. Pathak, Sociology, SAU.
About The Department - Vision and Beyond



Over the last half century or so, a vast body of knowledge(s) on the region has evolved within South Asia that mostly remain within the countries of their origin due to a number of reasons. In this specific context, there is a crucial need to share some of this knowledge in contemporary times when, despite assertions of localisations and mini-narratives, the universal does retain its emphasis through a constant dialectics of the two. The debate between the local and universal or mini-narratives and meta-narratives continue to rage, and is more clearly visible in the context of South Asian context. Even so, we are acutely aware of the non-existence of regular and serious forums for South Asian scholarship in social sciences to showcase our own research and thinking. We are also quite conscious of the fact that the process of establishing sociology in the region has created its own peculiarities which has established close inter-relationships between sociology and social anthropology, history, cultural studies, archeology and other related disciplines. We consider the porousness of South Asian sociology one of its most enduring strengths. On the other hand, we are not unaware of the unfortunate regressions sociology has experienced in different South Asian contexts over the last 30 years or so marked by numerous institutional failures.



It is within the context(s) outlined above that the Department of Sociology at South Asian university, initiated in 2011 witihn the Faculty of Social Sciences contributes to teaching, training and knowledge production. It is not intended to be a mere forum for the production of cutting-edge intellectual knowledge and exchange of that knowledge traversing across national borders in South Asia and beyond. Our expectation is that this knowledge would dislocate the persistence of an imposed framework emanating from the colonisation process and postcolonial politics of knowledge. Despite the passage of over fifty years since the process of official decolonization began in the region, much of the analyses of our problems, situations, histories and dynamics emanate from Euro American academia; this is certainly the case when it comes to conceptual formulations and theoretical approaches that are being employed in exploring the region’s social and cultural complexities often without much self-reflection.



The Department of Sociology strongly believes in the need to reformulate this situation by effectively centering South Asia without naively shunning thought from these established centers of knowledge be they in Europe or North America. We believe in an active and robust engagement with these issues within South Asia. In this context, through the work of its faculty and the research of graduate students, the Department would bring forward the newer forms of knowledge that comprehends and represents the South Asian context with a more authoritative and nuanced voice. We strongly believe in the need to actively intervene in the process of knowledge formation through a constant sharing of knowledge that the region produces as well as through interaction with the world beyond the region.



The courses taught in the Department as well as the research carried out by its faculty members reflect this overall vision and our collective commitment towards innovation, move beyond untenable stereotypes, and explore a new world of knowledge within the discipline of Sociology.


Class of 2011, Department of Sociology, South Asian University; Image: Courtesy of Dev N. Pathak, Sociology, SAU.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Contributions to Contemporary Knowledge Lecture Series - 2015

Faculty of Social Sciences at South Asian University
In collaboration with the Department of Sociology

Present

Contributions to Contemporary Knowledge - 2015

Gandhi as a Global Thinker:
Legacies of the Anti-Colonial Revolution

By

Keith Hart

Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology
Department of International Development
London School of Economics
And
International Director
Human Economy Program
University of Pretoria, South Africa


Date and Time:
Thursday, 29 January 2015; 06.00 PM

Venue:
Multipurpose Hall
India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi

Abstract of lecture: The new human universal is not an idea; it is 7 billion of us searching for ways of living together on this planet. In order to do so we must be able to conceptualise world society as something that each of us can relate to meaningfully. Global thinking is in short supply and I look for it in key moments of world society’s formation.

Europeans launched world society in the nineteenth century when they coerced the peoples of the planet into joining their colonial empires. As a result, by 1900 Europeans controlled 80% of the inhabited land. The main event of the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution, when colonised peoples sought to establish their own independent relationship to world society. 

Hart takes two main sources as exemplary of this movement: three New World Panafricanists (W E B Dubois, C L R James and Frantz Fanon) and Mohandas K Gandhi. In the early twentieth century, Panafricanism, fuelled by resistance to racism and was the most inclusive political movement in the world. Gandhi fed indirectly off these currents during his two decades in South Africa.

Kant claimed for himself a Copernican revolution in metaphysics. “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects… (but what) if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?” Understanding must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in all the judgments each of us has made. So the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. One definition of ‘world’ is ‘all that relates to or affects the life of a person’. Our task is to bring the two poles together as subjective individuals who share the object world in common with the rest of humanity.

Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was devastating. He held that it disabled its citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts, when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ self-reliance. He proposed an anthropology based on two universal postulates: that every human being is a unique personality and as such participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie a great variety of associations. Gandhi settled on the village as the most appropriate social vehicle for human development.

The problem Gandhi confronted is crucial. If the world is devoid of meaning, then, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to specially trained experts, leaves each of us feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet, modern cultures tell us that we have significant personalities. In this context, how does one  bridge the gap between a vast, unknowable world, which we experience as an external object, and a puny self, endowed with the subjective capacity to act alone or with others? 

We must scale down the world, scale up the self or a combination of both. Traditionally this task was performed by religion, notably through prayer. Gandhi chose the village as the site of India’s renaissance because it had a social scale appropriate to self-respecting members of the civilization. Moreover, he devoted a large part of his philosophy and practice to building up the personal resources of individuals, not least his own. One aim of the lecture is to bring this project up to date.

About the speaker:  Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and International Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria. He is an anthropologist by training and a self-taught economist who lives in Paris with his family. He also has a home in Durban, South Africa.

Hart studied classics and went on to explore the African diaspora in West Africa, North America, the Caribbean, Britain, France and South Africa. He has taught for a long time in Cambridge University, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. 

His interests include building a human economy; economic anthropology; money and finance; informal economy; African development; migration; national capitalism; the digital revolution in communications; social media; intellectual property and its discontents; the emergence of world society; world citizenship.

His recent books include Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (2009), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010) and People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South (Vol. 1 in Berghahn’s Human Economy series), all co-edited volumes. He wrote Economic Anthropology (2011) with Chris Hann. He authored The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (2000) and numerous papers. His next book, about African development in the twenty-first century, will be Africa: The Coming Revolution.

Invitations: If you would like to have an invitation to the lecture, please send a request with your name, postal address, email addresses to the following email addresses: sociology@sau.ac.in; mallika@sau.ac.in
For more information, please contact:

Mallika Shakya, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Samson George, Personal Secretary to the Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences
Telephone: +91-11-24122512-14; +91-11-24195000

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