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 Encumbered Ontology: An Intimate Foray into the Sociality of Human Organs(University of North Bengal, 31-03-2023) 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 ‘At the Entrance of the Kidney Transplantation Ward’: Narrating Ethnographic Anxieties and Negotiations(University of North Bengal, 2022-03) Roy, PinakiThe self or subjective experiences of the ethnographer are essential components of the ethnographic text. Ethnographic studies of disease, aliment and bodily suffering, and the fear of imminent death, resulting from any chronic disease like kidney failure cannot rule out the fact that the ethnographer is deeply implicated in the experiences narrated and represented in the ethnographic text. In the process of gaining knowledge, the ethnographer is subject to experiences which generate personal and ethical anxieties as result of encounter with the characteristic experiences of the ailing person and the immediate nexus of inter-personal relations, including family and kinship relations, surrounding the person. The personality of the ethnographer in such studies is very crucial for such fields of experience throw up challenges for documenting the unique nuances of the experiences characteristic to it. In this paper I ruminate as an ethnographer on my experiences of encountering the field of kidney failure, dialysis and transplantation and the anxieties I had to encounter during my fieldwork and how I sought to negotiate or resolve them. This paper is a reflexive engagement with the suffering of people with kidney failure and those immediately responsible as care-givers as much as it is a narrative about my personal negotiations with the anxieties such study generates.Item Open Access Of Xenotransplantation and Animal Futures: Science-Market Conviviality and the Engineering of Hope(University of North Bengal, 31-03-2021) Roy, PinakiThe active, optimistic involvement of xenoengineering companies in the lucrative business of producing transgenic pigs as sources of xeno-organs for solving the shortage of transplantable human organs, the ethical problems involved in inflicting pain on animals in such xenoexperiments and the financial unviability of such alternatives for public use, calls for critical, sociological attention. Financial investments and market projections are inherent to the forces that enable and give direction to scientific innovations like xenotransplantation. The mutual show of trust between the technoscience experts and financial investors in the xenotransplants venture shows how convivial science and market are in the hopeful venture of seeking solution to organ crisis through production of genetically engineered pigs which are human compatible, and are variously called “galsafe” pigs or “perv free” piglets. These are hybrids and attractive commodities to be sold on the market, which xenoengineering companies produce to gain control of human biological future. Yet in these hopeful anthropocentric, humanist ventures the troubling question of fate of the animals in xenoexperiments and the hybrids-the cloned pigs, from which xenoorgans will be harvested for transplantation, is reluctantly set aside.Item Open Access Journeys of the self: everyday and the question of ethics(University of North Bengal, 31-03-2017) Roy, PinakiIn this paper, I talk about my journeys, along different routes, at different points or moments in life. Journey here is conceived of in dual sense. I speak of physical journeys – journeys which transport us from one spatial and temporal locale to another and simultaneously invoke the conception of life as a journey. We encounter moments of ethical crises, both in the physical journeys and in the journey called life. Ethical living and ethical action, the universal prescriptions guiding them and the particular contexts and modes of ethical articulation are significant aspects of our everyday life. It is in the context of the everyday that we negotiate these moments of ethical crises. This paper is composed of such moments from my own life, from my own journeys.Item Open Access “Fixing” Female Bodies through Reproductive Medicine and Assisted Reproduction: An Ideological Critique(University of North Bengal, 2019-03) Roy, PinakiAn ideological critique of reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction’s disavowed socio-cultural complicity in the reiteration of the ideology of heterosexism necessitates a radical interrogation of the presupposed unmediated materiality of the sexed body. This ideological critique, which foregrounds the discursively and ideologically constructed materiality of the sexed body, refrains from fictionalizing the sexed body. On the contrary, this critique attempts to show that the sexed body is a “reified” entity, (re)produced as unmediated through mediations of different technologies of power and the ideological processes immanent in these technologies. These mediations render possible thinking of the sexed body as an entity, yet these mediations which are constitutive of the body are categorically disavowed by the so-called decontextualized medical knowledge and practice in search of objectivity and universality.Item Open Access Of Objective Claims and Located Accounts: An Ideological Plea to Rethink Knowledge in Assisted Reproductive Technologies from a Feminist Standpoint(University of North Bengal, 2018-03) Roy, PinakiAttempts to critically grapple with the practice of Assisted Reproductive Technologies cannot solely focus on the objective medical claims of the practitioners. Holistic and inclusive perspective on the operations of this domain should also engage and reflect on the located accounts of the intending mothers, who are mostly at the receiving end in this domain. Their located accounts can help us rethink the dominant conceptions, both clinical and cultural, of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (henceforth ARTs) as a medico-technological enterprise from a feminist standpoint.