SOCIAL TRENDS
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Social Trends is an interdisciplinary refereed journal, published annually by the Department of Sociology, North Bengal University. All rights reserved. No part of the articles, excepting brief quotations in scholarly works, can be published/reproduced, without the written permission of the editor.
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Item Open Access Micro-Entrepreneurial Issues and Challenges of Darjeeling Hills: An Inquiry(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Tamang, RosanStudy provides an understanding of sociological challenges concerning micro-entrepreneurial activities in Darjeeling hills. Historically, micro-entrepreneurship has played a dynamic role in contributing to economic growth, environmental sustainability, and employment generation in different parts of the country. More specifically, it plays a key role in the region where large industries are not viable due to geographical constraints, as it becomes an essential driving force in promoting regional balance, reducing disparities between plains and hills, and preserving the traditional material culture of the diverse ethnic groups and tribes of different regions. Based on fieldwork conducted in different areas, including rural and urban areas of the Darjeeling hills between June and December 2022 through some ethnographic insight. The findings point out that the hills micro entrepreneurs faced several challenges and restrictions, resulting in inadequate opportunities to flourish despite the environment of entrepreneurship that emerged in this neoliberal digital era.Item Open Access Indigenous Therapeutics, Public Discourse and the Politics of Practice in 20th Century Colonial Bengal(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Gupta, AnuradhaState sanctioned archival documents on indigenous medicine is reflective of the practice of forgetting and foregoing in constructing an “Indian Medical System”. These documents not being the only one in public discourse bears open an elite practice of institutionalisation of a dynamic field with possibilities in voices and vocation that transgresses such elite and authoritarian definitions. The public discourse is a space that not only accommodates the “official” but also a wide range of documents that have an official charge but does not fit into the restrictive scope of the statist registers of qualifying as officially sanctioned knowledge. The article attempts to make a close reading of public policy of documents of indigenous medicines in the late colonial period in India and the vast circulation of printed matters, especially Bengali periodicals publishing on the same, that were being published in those years and reading them together in a dialogue. Unlike reading them as existing dichotomously, the article attempts to study what Henry Lefebvre calls the “present” in understanding the everyday life. The task of policy makers around medical matters and practitioners in constructing an authentic charter overlooks these periodicals that supplements the former’s nationalist cause as well as circumvent it. Grihachikitsa and Mustiyog, that the article will focus upon, dotting these periodicals continue to pose itself as an epistemic conundrum refusing to settle indigenous therapeutics into any dominant discourse and disciplinisation. Methodologically, everyday life of therapeutic matters will unfold the problem of knowledge formation around the historicity of these medicinal materials and also how it remains a contested field due to the policies that overlook the identities around caste, regional, linguistic and gender diversity in contributing to the epistemic repertoire of “national medicine”.Item Open Access Mountains, Modernity and Nature: Reconfiguring the aspects of Himalayan Mountaineering(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Dutta, Debadityapaper traces the genealogy of mountaineering from its origin in the Alpine mountains to its manifestation in the Himalaya through the mechanisms of colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Mountaineering and modernity coincided with each other and conquering the Himalayan mountains became a colonial project. The paper attempts to show how the entanglements between nature and humans were (re)organised as mountaineering unfolded in the high Himalaya. From records on the early Himalayan surveys and expeditions the paper tries to comprehend the reconfiguration brought about in the Himalaya through colonial survey and mountaineering in its early days of inception.Item Open Access Bed Rest at Childbirth: Exploring Empirical Dimensions of Support and Vulnerability(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Sharma, Rukmaniphenomenon of childbirth is a social event, whereby women hailing from both conventional and modern societies bestow substantial credence upon their social counterparts for the provision of emotional and psychological sustenance. The established importance of obtaining social support from one’s biological kin has been widely recognised. It is of utmost importance to adopt a discerning perspective when dealing with this reliance and evaluate it from a sociological standpoint, rather than simply acknowledging it as a mundane occurrence. The inquiry into the selection process of women beneficiaries and benefactors in times of vulnerability may shed light on the uncharted rules and norms governing social support. A comprehensive evaluation of the care dependency of expectant mothers mandates a meticulous examination of the sociocultural milieu in which they are positioned. The ongoing inquiry pertains to a specific cohort of women who give birth within a biomedicalized urban setting, wherein modern techniques enable the detection of potential risks with unparalleled efficiency. Expectant mothers are often troubled by the possibility of being classified as high-risk throughout the duration of their gestation period. Pregnancies that present a heightened risk are subject to meticulous oversight, diagnostic evaluations, and targeted pharmacological interventions. Although bed rest is a commonly prescribed intervention for the management of pregnancies with a high risk of complications, its effectiveness cannot always be assured. It is widely acknowledged that a considerable segment of the women lacks the requisite resources and capabilities to comply with the recommended protocols of prolonged antenatal and postnatal bed rest. The present study endeavours to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the organizational culture of Prakash Hospital, with a specific emphasis on the impact of unique social and economic determinants on the assimilation of bed rest norms among women. In a general sense, the discussion regarding the notion of bed rest pertains to the capacity of women to alleviate potential risks via reliance on their maternal kinship networks (baper bari).Item Open Access Contested Resources, History and Epistemologies: The Lived Experiences of the Indigenous Forest Villagers in North Bengal(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Paul, MrinaliniThis paper argues that Adivasi and tribal studies in India have been overshadowed by methodologies and ideologies bearing heavy colonial underpinnings. In order to develop this discipline further with sound epistemological base, it is necessary to engage with methodologies of a more organic and post-colonial nature. This paper uses the Adaptation-Negotiation-Freedom (ANF) framework (Bodhi and Jojo 2019) to understand the historical and contemporary critical events in the lives of the indigenous and Adivasi communities of the forest villages of North Bengal. The ANF framework has been developed contesting the predominant Isolation-Assimilation- Integration (IAI) framework that arises from a caste society understanding and defines the “tribal” as a residual category. The larger significance of adopting such a framework, beyond academics, is that these researches and data contribute to the policy framework of the country. One of the reasons for the continuous socio-economic deprivation and cultural dispossession of the tribal communities in the country, in spite of various legal safeguards, protective legislations and constitutional provisions, can definitely be attributed to the epistemological injustice taking place. This paper is based on a qualitative ethnography which places the researcher’s descriptions, observations and the forest villagers’ experiences (mostly Rabhas and Oraons) in both the ANF and IAI framework, and finds that the former offers a relatively authentic story of the micro socio-cultural politics and narratives arising from the landscape.Item Open Access Living in Care Crisis: The Case of the Urban Middle- Class Elderly in India(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Roy, SinjiniFor ages, the aged in India lived in the care of their children, grandchildren, other family members, close kin, and neighbours. However, in recent times, especially in the urban middle-class context, a growing number of elderly are made to live lonely lives in their own house or apartment, mainly under the care of hired service providers or in old age homes. In such living arrangements, the elderly, with broken health and multiple ailments, live amidst insecurities, fear of illness and death, the pain of living alone and away from children, who are now dispersed to different places, and so on. They live with the happy memory of living amid close ones and with never-ending longing for their children and grandchildren who live afar. The care crisis, thus construed, is rooted in some radical changes in the life world of urban middle class families over the last two-three generations, especially in the post-Independence period. The modernity-induced rationalization of life, reflected in fertility checks, careerism, and spatial movements of the younger generation, which have grown manifold in the recent decades of globalization, have contributed to this crisis.Item Open Access Writing on the Body: Indigenous Medicine and Bangla Periodicals (1850-1901)(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Chakravarti, SunritaThis paper tries to engage with the discursive construction of the diseased/healthy native body in the essays on health and medicine published in Bangla periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century like Bibidhartho Sangraha, Chikitsa Sammelani, Rahasya Sandarbhya, Shwasthya, Chikitsak o Somalochak and so on. I have attempted to show how the discourses on indigeneous medicine and the diseased/ healthy body of the native in these essays is a product of contradictory forces – the desire to posit the “difference” vis-a-vis the Western medical discourses and the anxiety of establishing the “scientificity” of indigeneous medicine, particularly Ayurveda. With a focus on textual instances drawn from these essays I have argued how these writings can be seen as an attempt to create a counter discourse against the pathologisation of space and the native body in early to mid-nineteenth century colonial medical discourses.Item Open Access Analysing Classification and its Implications: Inequality, Ideology and Power(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Beri, SurajPresent paper endeavours to delve into the concept of classification and its pertinence within the realm of social sciences. Through an exploration of existing social science literature in anthropology, and sociology, this analysis undertakes a critical examination of the social and political processes involved in the classification of individuals, identities, groups, categories, and, ultimately, moral and cultural discourses. The potential exists for an ideological “misrecognition” of the historical context, whereby certain categories and concepts are emphasised over others, resulting in the eulogising of specific identities while rendering the articulation of certain forms of inequality impossible. The utility and ramifications of categorization are being discussed.Item Open Access Encumbered Ontology: An Intimate Foray into the Sociality of Human Organs(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Roy, PinakiAppadurai’s (1986) “social life of things” approach helps conceptualize human organs as not merely biological but deeply embedded in complex social relationships, and implicated in the associated hierarchies within which they acquire significance. Disputes in the interpersonal realm in immediate, everyday contexts of ailment, disease and its management foregrounds the encumbered ontology of bodies and organs – their entanglement in relational disputes articulated in and through the ailing body and failing organ. Drawing on unanticipated moments in the life-trajectory of the researcher – an essentially unconventional source of data in now canonized practices of sociological and anthropological research, this paper demonstrates that people who are ill or afflicted with some disease which requires personalized care and group attention, physical involvement and financial expenses, often become objects of dispute over issues of care, support and responsibility. Such discourses reaffirm the social – the responsibility of the family and friends or the wider kin group towards the ill, as much as they are discourses of contention over issues like who is ideally responsible for taking care of the ill and dependent? How the responsibility is to be shared or distributed within the family or amongst immediate kin members? And if the responsibility is not to be divided equally, what are the plausible grounds for waiving or discounting one over another? Engagement with unanticipated yet immediate situations of kidney failure and its familial management reveals that such disputes need not always seamlessly centre on the question of ownership of property of the ailing beyond death, but around the failing or afflicted organ itself, in that it serves as the material-symbolic locus of disputes which frames the human organ as encumbered property.Item Open Access Escaping the Revolution: Interpreting French Migration after 1789(University of North Bengal, 2023-03-31) Saha, AnjanFrench Revolution of 1789 is regarded to be an epoch making event – a watershed in history with ample justification. However, the incident triggered a massive wave of political migration. Émigré (French for emigrant) from all levels of French society dispersed throughout Europe in the 1790s. Politically speaking, these ‘enemies’ of the Revolution belonging overwhelmingly to the Aristocracy and Clergy, attempted to mobilize their host societies against the Revolution, which grew increasingly radical as it spilled across French boundaries. The response of the Revolutionary France was swift and brutal, as the emigres were stripped of their titles, property, rights and promised an immediate visit to guillotine should they dared to return. At the same time they became agents in a multifaceted process of cultural transfer, as part of their attempt to earn their livelihood in exile. They had demonstrated that there were alternatives to the revolutionary process outside of France, before most of them returned to their motherland under Napoleon Bonaparte.