Social Trends, Vol. 11

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/5344

Editor's Note

A large group of young sociologists from different parts of India have been working together as members of the Research Committee (RC) 28 – Sociology of Everyday Life – of the Indian Sociological Society (ISS), exploring the nuances and essences of this fascinating subfield of the living discipline called Sociology. The RC members meet at the All-India Sociological Conferences (AISCs) held in December every year and at national-level seminars organized by the Research Committee in different parts of the country, in collaboration with colleges and universities, between two AISCs. Some research papers, thus generated, are selected and published in the volumes of Social Trends. Most of the papers selected for this Volume (Vol. 11, 2024) of Social Trends were presented in a two-day national seminar organized by the RC 28 in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, North Bengal University, and the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata (IDSK) in the latter’s office on 27-28 June 2022. Prof. Prasanta Ray and Prof. Maitrayee Chaudhuri presented their papers as the keynote and valedictory addresses in the national seminar on “Freedom and Unfreedom in Everyday Life”, which was organized at the Department of Sociology, North Bengal University, in collaboration with RC 28 – Sociology of Everyday Life – of the Indian Sociological Society (ISS), on 19-20 March 2024. The paper by Dr. Lhamu Tshering Dukpa and Prof. Swati Akshay Sachdeva, a notable addition to this volume, is invited. We thus planned this volume of Social Trends as a special volume on “Sociology of Everyday Life”. Only one paper, that by Ramesh Kumar on Kabir panties, is slightly outside the scope of the main theme of this volume; however, it is an interesting paper on an interesting subject.

While exploring the “mundane, trivial, unconscious, uncritical and often unnoticed” micro aspects of everyday life of the differentially located individuals and groups, the contributors to this volume of Social Trends have unravelled the complex areas of subjectification and the “dialogical and dialectical” relationship between the subjects and the constraining forcesof the lifeworld. Borrowing insights from the rich body of social science theories the scholars have discovered how the mundane everyday life of the common people constitutes a social field of alienation, the “death” and “rebirth” of the subjects, both in individual and collective forms; they have recorded in their narratives on how the “unfree” selves strive for a freer space while negotiating, subverting and transforming the conventional structural technologies and institutions of subject formation and subjugation. The papers in unison argue that the subjects under no circumstances, even when authoritarianism looms large, lose their agencies since they record their sufferings in their cognition and regroup to express themselves in one form or another; they express their agencies in different shades and forms depending upon the levels of their precariousness, consciousness and “will to power and change” and, in the process, redefine themselves.

We hope the present volume of Social Trends will set the platform for the members of the Research Committee (RC 28) – Sociology of Everyday Life - of the Indian Sociological Society to explore new research terrains and add richness, substance, and methodological finesse to this subdiscipline of Sociology.

Prof. Sanjay K. Roy
Department of Sociology
North Bengal University
31 March 2024

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Author: search.filters.author.Sinha, Titasha

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    Food, Fetish and Public Display: A Sociological Analysis of the Performativity Involved in Consumption of Food
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Sinha, Titasha
    Food is basic, natural and private. But when it comes to “eating” it essentially intertwines the notion of “performance” as eating is the “act of having food”. It involves an attention towards the performance of the act while eating. Now when this act of having food takes place in “public” the performative notion provides a space for the individual agency to translate this mundane, bodily need of having food to the act of consuming food in turn relegating it to an altogether different status. The sites of eating transform into a single site that becomes the theatre of “action”, the action is that of consumption. The social categories that previously dictated food choices, cooking and eating were largely found to be dictated by the social categories of caste, religion, culture etc. Contemporary urban settings have emphasised the performative dimension of all the activities related to food and eating. The foci of food are seen to traverse between hunger, appetite and “appetite appeal” making people wander in a state of trance to figure out the primacy between “real” and “symbolic” values attached to food. Analysing Goffman’s concept of performance as a theoretical framework together with the concept of panopticon surveillance of Foucault we have tried in this paper to develop a deeper understanding of the theme. Among 70 Hindu, educated, urban, middle and upper-middle class youth in Kolkata questionnaire as part of the quantitative study as well as qualitative method of observation was employed to figure out and analyse the contemporary situation. Participants were found to be strongly motivated by the “performative” dimension involved in food and its related activities. Tendencies of fantasising about food by performing the act of eating are popularised among people. Food has been treated as a fetish that is manifested with the symbolic association of food that goes well beyond the realm of hunger to the realm of “social appetite”.