Department of Sociology

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/3478

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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    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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    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.