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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    Everyday Living Body of Ma
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bagchi, Keya
    The female body is always the point of curiosity, the centre of attraction and a matter of contemplation and contestation from time immemorial. The public “gaze” of both males and females is always fixed on her body. There has always been an endless social discussion on how she will dress, decorate, manipulate maintain or shape her body. It is a very prevalent picture in every era as is also in a modern or post-modern world. Alongside this public opinion about the female body, a woman’s body is always considered to be seductive, enigmatic and alluring. This female body seems very often to be a “desirable other” (Thapan 1995) as depicted in magazines, cinemas, advertisements, on the catwalk and so on. When a woman’s physical beauty is appreciated, she is perceived only based on her body about her sexuality. This “objectification” of the female body is much more emphasized than anything else. The whole process of the objectification of the body is closely related to sexuality which, according to Mackinnon, is ‘a dimension along which gender occurs and through which gender is socially constituted’ (1994:260). Thus, a female body is always a subject of rigid social judgement, evaluation and scrutiny. While talking about the body in everyday life vis-à-vis gender, it can, therefore, be argued that the gendered subject is neither a biological being nor even a psychological being, rather a social being (Thapan 1995) and a woman realizes social identity through experiencing her femininity in inter-subjective relationships with other people. This experience of femininity is closely intertwined with the complex matrix of class, caste, regional and socio-economic components. How a gendered subject is constructed by herself is once again the product of the process of social construction. In this paper, I will represent the visions of some women who have become mothers in their early thirties and living in the Malda Municipal area to explore how the physical embodiment of women is influenced by gender in everyday life with an emphasis on their realizations, wishes and imaginations.
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    Governance of Sleep: Story of Sleeping Bodies and Networks of Discourse
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Saha, Ayatree
    This essay engages with the “government” of sleep that is constituted by discursive regularities as well as normative procedures. Sleep is not only regulated by the state but by different modes that involve the social as well as economic conditions. The essay uses a Foucauldian lens to look at the discourse around sleep and the technological interventions that mediate between human subjects and objects. It is in this context of neo-liberalism that this essay examines the governance of sleeper’s bodies imbricated within the nexus of power relations. With the coming of age of techno-social interaction, not only is sleep commodified but the universal necessity of it, is packaged within the 24/7 global productivity. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s concept of power and discipline, Bruno Latour’s idea of mediation via objects producing hybrids, and Simon J. William’s formulation of sleep, I argue for the kind of mediation that makes sleep a hybrid concept in itself. The essay constitutes the general conditions and problems of the “government of sleep” consisting of a more discursive and transcendental orientation to constitute the overall analytic of sleep as a field of control, mobilisation and suppression within modern capitalism. The essay lays out the specific technologies of the governance/ government of sleep that the grid of power in societies determined by conditions of capitalist production and extraction forge.
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    Familiarity amidst the Unfamiliar: Situating Everyday Life in the Practice of Package Tours
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Ghosh, Shamayeeta
    Tourism is an institutionalized form of temporary leisured mobility and a tourist is a person who temporarily moves away from home to experience change. Tourism is a modern practice premised upon the separation between everyday life and sites of touristic gaze as well as work and leisure. Touristic practices presuppose the suspension and reversal of everyday life. Travelling for leisure has its origin in the desacralization and secularization of nature facilitated by the Romantic Movement. The establishment of railways was the primary logistical factor behind the development of mass tourism in Europe and its colonies. Organized mass tourism grew in Europe as a result of rising income levels and standards of living, shortening of the work year along with legislation of paid holidays and rapid improvement in the means of transportation in the mid-twentieth century. Tourism in pre-independent India, contrarily, developed as a colonial project of institutionalizing and commercializing the traditional practice of pilgrimage. After independence, tourism started flourishing in the hands of private tour operators. Kundu Special, a leading Bengali tour operator, is believed to have pioneered the practice of conducting package tours in India. Based on my ethnographic research that took package tours conducted by Kundu Special as shifting anthropological fields, this paper analyses the practices constituting package tours that are designed to construct an “everyday” environment for Bengali tourists outside Bengal. It intends to highlight the way the institutional arrangements of package tours are designed to encapsulate tourists in a bubble of familiar environment to minimize their exposure to the strangeness of unfamiliar cultures. Quintessential Bengali food is a major component of the packages intended to facilitate unmediated transportation of Bangaliyana to distant locales. The tourists opting for package tours travel in groups comprising only Bengali co-travellers and are always accompanied by a team of managers, porters and cooks committed to making them feel at home away from home. Secluded into a world of familiar language, culinary experience and culture created for them, these tourists fail to immerse themselves into the host cultures and have unmediated interactions with local people. Bound by native cultural traits and habits, these tourists, therefore, view the people, culture and sites through the protective walls of their environmental bubble. This paper intends to analyse how elements of everyday life that are believed to be antithetical to touristic practices lie at the heart of the practice of conducting package tours. Its primary rationale is to show how package tours juxtapose familiarity and novelty.
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    From Collective Freedom to Individual Choice: The Sociology of Everyday Life
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Chaudhuri, Maitrayee
    This paper disentangles how freedom and unfreedom play out in people’s everyday lives. The author argues that the idea of an unencumbered individual is a product of a specific history and freedom is a goal everyone desires and pursues. While conceding that those in power set the rules to control the life of the common people and that the latter are free to express and resist as a part of the dialectics of power relations the author questions whether this “resistance” in everyday life is an integral part of the system. The author expresses doubt about the inevitability of resistance by the weak, and asks if academics should now rest happy that the subjugated still breathe free. The paper seeks answers to these questions at a time when authoritarianism looms large.