Department of Sociology

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The present Department of Sociology was established as a combined Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by the University of North Bengal in 1976. Professor Niren Ch. Choudhury, eminent anthropologist, was the first Professor and Head of the Department who provided the leadership in the formative years of the Department.Professor R.K.Bhadra and Dr.Namita Choudhury were associated with him since inception of this department and helped in the process of its development. The bifurcation between sociology and anthropology took place in 2001 and thus the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology was renamed Department of Sociology and a separate Department of Anthropology was established under the Science Faculty. From its beginning the Department of Sociology has been training students for three courses: M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. The Department has produced more than 30 Ph.Ds and more than one thousand Masters. Besides the two main programmes the Department invites visiting faculty, from the reputed national and international universities and the faculty of this department visit the universities abroad on visiting faculty programme and for attending seminars/conferences. The teachers of the Department encourage students to take part in academic discussions outside the class-room interaction and encourage them to present papers in seminars/conferences. In recognition of the good work done by the Department the University Grants’ Commission (UGC) has granted the Special Assistance Programme (DRS – 1) in 2007 which has facilitated undertaking a good number of research projects on issues relating to gender question and the problem of ethnicity in the North Bengal region. The Department has been organizing a national level seminar every year on the gender and ethnicity related issues, which constitute the focal theme of the SAP. As a part of the programme the Department publishes Occasional Papers and edited volumes based on the research articles that are produced under different SAP related programs.

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Author: search.filters.author.Ghosh, ShamayeetaSubject: search.filters.subject.everyday life

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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.