Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

In this article, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist examine a Sufi shrine-based concept of affliction known as asrat (an “effect” in Hindi-Urdu, “difficulty” in Arabic) and related practices of healing in urban north India. Rather than being located in an individual body, asrat afflictions are shared, most often within a household or kinship group. Through surveys, clinical assessments, and ethnographic work, we track three different ways in which afflictions move between bodies, and the mechanisms at work in asrat healing processes. Rather than a “collectivist” concept of the psyche, we suggest that a key role of shrine-based therapeutic processes is to manage a “suspicion system,” related to experiences of psychic and economic injuries and conflict between intimates and kin. Through a multi-sited research design that moves across a leading Sufi shrine, an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, and one of India's leading psychiatric facilities, we argue that within asrat-related processes, psychic vulnerabilities are addressed by “re-combining” relations through forms of inter-subjective attunement within a smaller segment of the kin group, potentially making symptoms and the burden of care and conflict more livable. We suggest that shrine-based concepts and practices may be cross-culturally significant, even for secular understandings of the inter-subjective dimensions of mental illness.

World University root node

Transcultural Psychiatry

The contagion of mental illness: Insights from a Sufi shrine

This transcription of a presentation, commentary and a discussion at IIM Bangalore in 2020 has three parts. In Part 1, contested definitions of food, urgent food questions and concepts of food systems are clarified before considering the ways agricultural markets are integrated in food systems, the contradictory principles at work in policies for their regulation, and the ways such policy practices are imagined. Sixteen multidisciplinary depictions of global food systems, agricultural markets and food policies are analysed, concluding that their conceptual fracturing results from a disregard of theory. New models of the Indian food system will need to give rigorous attention to institutions for policy. Part 2 problematises the empirical granularity needed to understand market behaviour that policymakers ignore as they shift agriculture from being the driver of industrialisation to being a residualised welfare sector. By continuing to ignore and misunderstand existing physical markets, regulatory reforms like the new central laws assume that the deregulation would somehow automatically bypass the vast number of private intermediaries necessary for distribution whose relatively easy-to-enter, small-scale activity undercuts the transaction costs of corporate agribusiness. In doing so, they lose sight of the original purpose and need for public regulation in primary agricultural markets in the first place. Part 3 discusses the need for consultative policy processes for policy and the implications for small scales and informality in agriculture and its markets of the close integration of self-employment in the rural non-farm economy.

Economic and Political Weekly

Agro-food Systems and Public Policy for Food and Agricultural Markets A Discussion

Buddhist monks have become increasingly visible in environmental movements in the last few decades, including in Arunachal Pradesh, India, my fieldwork site. Monks in environmental protests have contributed to the popular representation of Buddhism as ecological. A review of existing literature suggests that what we are looking at is a re-interpretation of Buddhist traditional philosophy by modern environmentally conscious people and contemporary Buddhists. I argue that as anthropologists, we have to note that while Buddhism can help mobilise lay activism, local practices about the environment do not often overlap with Buddhist doctrine. I illustrate this through the example of the ban on yak meat in Arunachal Pradesh, which is linked to wider Hindu nationalist politics in India. Environmental activities in the Buddhist Himalayas cannot be understood simply through the lens of Buddhism and one has to adopt a more pluralistic approach that is accommodating of customs that do not fit within an imagined “environmental identity” (Sharma 2009). I propose Himalayan environmentalism as an alternative to Buddhist environmentalism, not to disregard the role of Buddhist belief but to show how Himalayan environmentalism goes beyond Buddhism in scope. Second, my intention is not to propose a uniform model for the Himalaya, but to point to the processes at work between culture, politics, and ecology, and to the role of power in fashioning environmental identities. I support my argument with empirical data from my own fieldwork and those of scholars working in other parts of the Himalaya.

New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

HIMALAYAN ENVIRONMENTALISM: BUDDHISM AND BEYOND

In this essay I try to suggest a non-teleological way of reading the history of anthropology, by placing Veena Das’s Textures of the ordinary (2020) in relation to her previous books, beginning with Structure and cognition: aspects of Hindu caste and ritual (1977). Rather than a teleological movement from structuralism to “post-structuralism” or “self-reflexive” work, I point to the continuation and transfiguration of the concepts of structure and event across Das’s different books, as a way of also imagining movements within social theory more broadly, without each successive “paradigm” having to dialectically negate its predecessor. Further, I ask what it means to age or to “mature” within a body of scholarly work, and how we might take an author to be growing simultaneously older and younger, if we take aging in thought not necessarily to be solely a question of chronology or teleology. © 2021. Sociologia e Antropologia. All Rights Reserved.

Fulltext

Sociologia e Antropologia

“In your writing I am existed”: Reading the History of Anthropology via Textures of the Ordinary[“Na sua escrita eu sou existida”: len do a história da antropologia via Textures of the ordinary]

This commentary, part of a forum on India’s Agrarian Question, analyses India’s new controversial union Farm Laws and the farmers’ protest against them in the context of the history of agricultural market laws, and the political mobilisation commonly observed in actually existing markets in different Indian states and regions. It identifies two critical shifts in law and protest and their emerging dynamics and contradictions. The first is the shift in the locus of regulatory power and resistance from the states to the union government; the second is the presence of farmers rather than traders at the forefront of protests against market reforms and in defence of local, state-regulated markets. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Journal of Peasant Studies

Agricultural market law, regulation and resistance: a reflection on India’s new ‘farm laws’ and farmers’ protests

Journal of Public Health (United Kingdom)

PerspectivesIs there an opioid epidemic in India?

Opioid abuse is an increasingly global phenomenon. Rather than assuming it to be a uniformly global or neoliberal pathology, how might we better understand comparative and locally specific dimensions of opioid addiction? Working with neighborhoods as a unit of analysis, this article analyzes the striking differences between patterns of addiction and violence in two proximate and seemingly similar urban poor neighborhoods in Delhi, India. Rather than global or national etiologies, I suggest that an attention to sharp ecological variation within epidemics challenges social scientists to offer more fine-grained diagnostics. Using a combination of quantitative and ethnographic methods, I show how heroin addiction and collective violence might be understood as expressions of what Durkheim called “suicido–genetic currents.” I suggest the idea of varying currents as an alternative to the sociology of neighborhood “effects” in understanding significant differences in patterns of self-harm and injury across demographically similar localities. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Can a Neighborhood Fall Sick? Opioid Addiction, Collective Violence and Currents of Death in Contemporary India

Sociological Bulletin

Pandemic of Inequality and the State: A Response to Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s ‘COVID-19 and Structural Inequalities: Some Reflections on the Practice of Sociology’

This article focuses on the Tawang and West Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India, collectively known as Monyul. It was ruled by Tibet for three centuries before the 1914 McMahon Line boundary included it in India. Even after that, cross-border exchanges between Monyul and Tibet continued until the 1962 Sino-Indian war, following which border passages between the two were closed. Today, Monyul is a marginal region, geographically distant from centres of industry and education, and lacking in terms of infrastructure. This article traces Monyul's marginality not simply to the border war, but to spatial practices of the British colonial state, beginning with the mapping of the boundary in 1914. It shows how Monyul was constructed as a buffer, despite being within a delimited boundary, first, by excluding it from regular administration, and, secondly, by pushing back the older Tibetan administration, thereby, making it (what I call) a ‘zone of difference/indifference’. But the buffer project was subject to contestation, mostly from the Tibetan religious aristocracy, whose temporal hold over, and material interests in, Monyul were challenged by the latter's incorporation into colonial India.

Modern Asian Studies

Producing Monyul as Buffer: Spatial politics in a colonial frontier

Focusing on the Delhi gang rape of 16 December 2012, the article describes the force of two aggregations by which the violence is carried out and represented—the raping mob and the mourning and protesting crowd. Even though all six members of the mob are arrested within three days of the rape, we find disparate and spontaneous crowd formations across the city, expressing their anger at police apathy and state indifference in securing public spaces. This article teases out the relationship between the mob and the crowd. As far as the mob is concerned I show how the trial court presupposes a bond that ties the members together. This bond is found in the elaboration of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘dacoity’. This connection is further amplified through detailed forensic evidence, which channels the animacy of the rape into a medical–legal language of fact. In reacting to the rape crowd formations point us to the intensity of an egalitarian release. I follow Canetti’s development of ‘discharge’ and sting, without which the crowd does not exist. Finally, I show how crowd formations intersect with public discourses drawn from visual reportage as well as the medical condition of the victim. © 2019 SAGE Publications.