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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    History and Practices of Kabir Panthies in North India: A Sociological Enquiry
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Kumar, Ramesh
    Kabir was a leading figure in the Bhakti movement, which revolted against the exploitative social order. It challenged the prevailing hegemony of Brahmins and Mullah and denounced other social evils like religious dogmas, exploitative caste, and immoral practices of the priests and the ruling classes. He criticises not only Hindu and Islamic religious rites that are shallow and superstitious but also the hallowed authority of religious scriptures like the Vedas, Puranas, and Quran. He also satirises high-class people’s claims of social superiority, particularly Brahmins and Kazis. After Kabir, his disciples formed Kabir Panth according to their convenience and interpreted his philosophy in their own way. The deviation of Kabir Panthies has been influenced by social setup. This article discusses the philosophy of Kabir and different strands that emerged in the practices of Kabir by different Kabir panthies. Mainly there are two different Math, i.e., Kabir Chaura of Banaras and Dhamkheda of Chhattisgarh. Hence the differences of Kabir Panth across North India, particularly the differences between the Kabir Chaura of Banaras and Dhamkheda of Chhattisgarh, are analysed and discussed in this article.
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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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    Rethinking Pain and Body in the Context of Everyday
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Saha, Sohini
    This article seeks to interrogate the common understanding of pain as an “extraordinary” event and rethink it in the context of the everyday. By critically engaging with the idea of pain as “negative” and “exceptional” that emerged with the advent of modernity, I intend to argue for the ordinariness of pain. I do so by bringing in three distinct contexts; pain in the practice of bayam (exercise), pain in asceticism, and religious pain to argue for the place of pain in the everyday. By bringing in my ethnographic fieldwork in the bayam samitis (traditional gymnasiums) and akharas of Kolkata, India, I argue that in the practice of bayam, pain becomes an everyday engagement with the body and remains crucial to its cultivation. The ethnographic works of Patricia Lawrence and Jane Derges in the warzone of Sri Lanka, I argue, bring in the everyday means of resisting violence through the embodiment of religious pain. Lastly, by employing Peter Van De Veer‘s understanding of ascetic pain and Glucklich’s (2001) sacred or religious pain, I argue that pain remains integral to the formation of ascetic subjectivity. Thus, these three distinct contexts raise the possibilities of understanding pain outside the negative connotations it has carried since modernity and make us delve into pain in ordinary everyday lives and circumstances.
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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”.
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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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    The Spectral Everyday: Introspecting Uncanniness in Short Stories of Satyajit Ray
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Chaudhuri, Runa Das
    In this paper, I explore two aspects of the Freudian uncanny in Satyajit Ray’s stories, namely, the mirror and the double and how the everyday spectres which these produce have a real presence. The appearance of spectres in these texts notifies us that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us. So, in an everyday otherwise besotted by hysterical blindness to apparitions, the reading of Ray’s narratives interlaced with that affect of uncanny, I argue, will give us a chance to reflect on everyday ghosts.
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    Leisurely Consumption and Freedom in Everyday Life
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bhowmick, Arunima
    This paper comes as an initiative to unravel the areas, like leisurely and especially leisurely consumptions, popularly associated with freedom and show how those could become the very source of unfreedom. Upon discussing the nuances of the neoliberal society and its entwined practices of consumption, I have tried to highlight the dialectical relation between freedom-dependency. The desire to be free is universal and perpetual, but this very desire is fraught with tendencies of dependency. Therefore, metaphysics and science both together have tried to explore the desire to be free and consequently encountered conditions and notions of the unfree. This paper wants to unclog notions of “absolute freedom” and “relative freedom” from the popular imagination, hinting at the everyday sources of unfreedom and associated negotiations to secure either form of freedom. Thus, build a commentary that reflects as it recites the micro experiences of remaining vulnerable to power, both normative and culturally transpired, and then finding counter-power positions of liberation—as mere illusions leading to further unfreedom.
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    Self as an Interpreter of Stigma: The Everyday Life Agony of the Hijras of North Bengal
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Dukpa, Lhamu Tshering; Sachdeva, Swati Akshay
    Social stigma is ubiquitous and characteristic of almost all human societies. Any supposed “anomalous” behaviour is often deemed as socially “reprehensible” eliciting in the process, social proscriptions to impose conformity and enforce consensus. The hijras of India constitute one such stigmatised ilk wherein they routinely experience social opprobrium and censure for irregularities vis-a-vis their gender and sexual identities that diverges from the heteronormative straitjackets normalised by society. Centring on “social stigma”, the present paper attempts to qualitatively apprehend the meanings that arise as and when the hijras interact/encounter “normal” in mainstream or hijra household settings. Drawing on the life story method and Goffman’s work on stigma, the paper seeks to foreground individuals as interpreters of stigma who consciously formulate meanings in their everyday lived social and interactional contexts.
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    Home I Call My Own: My Everyday and Beyond
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bhattacharyya, Bhattacharyya
    There is nothing more real in our lives than the reality of our everyday. The everyday that is created through earthly, disciplined, relatively insignificant actions helps us to look at our past, to pass through our present and to solidify, and secure the path of our future. But the everydays of each of us are differently constructed because it is shaped by the difference in our cultural contexts based on our identities such as caste, class, gender, religion, geographical disparity and ethnicity. I would like to show in this paper that my home, a physical structure is not a configuration in itself but an organized space where there are different objects used giving the space a definite meaning. The way I have redefined the place into space according to the culture I bear in my mind and through my actions and how I reformulate my idea of home: how my everydays are constructed through this arrangement. This paper shall also delve into how in the process of creating all everydays, living in the space has created an identity for me vis-à-vis how I have consciously created that identity for myself by creating a space called my own.