Social sciences and public debates: The case of India

• Main Authors: Veena Das, Shalini Randeria
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Les Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 2015-10-01
• Series: Socio
• Subjects: anthropological/sociological knowledge production/reception; academic ­pluri-centrism; Indian intellectual traditions; postcolonial studies; post-Western sociologies; epistemology and sociology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio/1915

This article focuses on a small slice of scholarly work in India (on democracy and dispossession, on myth, history and historiography) in order to understand how national public preoccupations continue to structure anthropological/sociological knowledge production and its reception within a pluri-centric academic world. We argue that though loci of enunciation affect processes of both knowledge production and ­consumption, global flows of ideas and resources do not translate into a simple relation of hegemony between metropolitan centres and so-called regional peripheries. Despite the asymmetry in resources, anthropological and sociological scholarship in the United States and Europe has not been decisive in shaping academic and research agendas on India in India. One reason for the larger resonance between social theory in India and abroad in our view is that Indian scholars in dialogue with Western social theory are contributing to it rather than applying imported concepts to the Indian context.