Sociology

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) is an autonomous research institute within the UN system that undertakes multidisciplinary research and policy analysis on the social dimensions of contemporary development issues. Through our work we aim to ensure that social equity, inclusion and justice are central to development thinking, policy and practice.

This article focuses on the vernacular spaces of roadside tombs—or mazaars—of anonymous saints (commonly referred to as ‘Zinda Pir Baba’) in the heart of the contemporary Indian capital, New Delhi. These mazaars are located along the megacity's main roads and constitute a shared space where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs perform rituals in ways that do not classify or identify them as members of rival religious communities. The custodians of grave-shrines shape and reshape social and religious inclusiveness along vernacular and contemporary planes. Simultaneously, the makeshift environments of grave-shrines create a space of in-betweenness that ruptures gender roles, sidelines histories of power, and contests urban planning in India’s capital city. n in the contemporary Indian capital.

Childhood is believed to be a stage that requires protection, both in national and international policymaking realms. This essay
looks at a few such intersections where lives of certain ‘categories’ of children have been gravely affected by laws meant for
their protection and rehabilitation. Through detailed exploration of the making of the anti-child labour law and the category of
railway children, this essay argues that repeatedly rehashed state plans of action to address child labour or children in railways
situation are dysfunctional because they have abysmally failed to address it with the depth, diversity, and comprehensiveness
required. This essay, touching upon case studies of child labour rescue raids conducted by the state in collaboration with
NGOs and ethnographic accounts of children who have been rescued, and children who have defined their life and work in
their own ways, attempts to explore how ‘childhood’ and ‘child agency’ have become a contested site between children, the
existing state and NGO/legal activist/child rights groups discourses on child protection.

This article examines the concept of ‘jointness’ in India’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme, understood as an engagement between the state (in this case the Forest Department) and people organized into ‘communities’, with NGOs, where available, acting as the interface. By examining the commonalities between older examples of joint or co-management of resources and current practices of joint forest management, the article challenges the notion that ‘jointness’ is a new feature of forest policy, or that it represents a resurgence of civil society against the state. Further, insofar as the basic agenda of the programme is pre-determined, it cannot be considered very participatory in nature. None the less, within the limited degree of choice that JFM allows, there is a new and joint construction of needs.

Recent attempts at introducing new forms of governance in forest management in India have focused on devolution to user-groups or village level “participatory committees.” Success or failure is attributed to the presence or absence of “social capital” among these groups. These groups have never existed outside the state, however, and social relations, including social capital, are continually being transformed by administrative and market forces. This paper argues that what matters is not the degree of government intervention, i.e., more or less devolution, or the degree of social capital among local communities, but state accountability. This can only be ensured through addressing questions of political reform.

Anthropologists concerned with political violence and justice must engage in a comparative examination of culpability for past and ongoing crimes. When powerful states use reparations, truth commissions, or war crime tribunals to attribute culpability to others, including their past selves, they often, paradoxically, legitimize ongoing injustices. As against culturalist explanations for mass violence, which set up a hierarchy of cultures, we need to look at the institutional sites through which public morality is constructed. This approach is illustrated with reference to the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, India, in 2002 and to the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003.

This article examines witchcraft accusations in Bastar, a predominantly adivasi or 'tribal' area in central India. In the European witchcrazes of the 16th and 17th centuries, which set the tone for much work on witchcraft, witches were predominantly women. In other Indian adivasi areas like Jharkhand or the Dangs, witch accusations have effectively been used to dispossess women, often widows, of land. In Bastar, while belief in witchcraft and sorcery is widespread, as part of a wider cosmology in which all unnatural actions, whether good or bad, are attributed to the work of the earth, spirits, or motivated humans, my evidence suggests that both women and men are equally targets of suspicion. Suspected practitioners of the 'occult' need not fit any pattern of gender, age, dependency, or kinship. However, all accusations appear to follow a series of illnesses. Accusations of occult malpractice, therefore, seem to be a way of coping with the uncertainties of human existence and attributing agency to local actors in a context where, in practice, people have little power. While the state has concentrated on coercive measures like imprisonment for those who have killed practitioners of the occult, it has done little to redress the concerns that give rise to such violence.

Exploring an ongoing civil war between Maoist guerrillas and the Indian government, this article looks at how emotions are mobilised, conscripted and engendered by both sides. The focus is, however, on the state's performance of emotion, including outrage, hurt and fear-inducing domination, as part of its battle for legitimacy. Intrinsic to this is the privileging of certain kinds of emotions—fear, anger, grief—and the emotions of certain kinds of people over others. Subject populations are distinguished from citizens by the differential public acknowledgement of their emotional claims.

This article argues that the ‘rule of law’ has become a central goal in popular struggles the world over, and it is citizenship struggles which infuse the rule of law with substantive, as against a thin procedural, meaning. This is especially true in post-colonial societies like India, with a tradition of inherited colonial law designed for subject-hood rather than citizenship, growing inequality which affects both the enactment and interpretation of law, and the violation of law by those who are meant to protect it. Demanding implementation of existing laws, breaking laws that are patently unjust whether through armed struggle or non-violent social movements, or seeking to change laws in favour of new and more democratic laws, are all major avenues by means of which people express their aspirations as citizens. However, law's mutually constitutive relation with social practice means that people enter into political and legal negotiations already constituted as certain kinds of legal subjects, which constrains their imagination in certain ways.

This article unpacks the history of a ‘tribal’ region in Central India to show that the current appearance of ‘two-dimensionality’ or stark opposition between the people and the state is a product of colonial and post-colonial policies rather than a pre-colonial relic. It challenges the idea of ‘coercive subordination’ as an adequate explanation for kingship in this area, as argued by the late Alfred Gell. Instead, this article uses the same phenomena, annual Dussehra rituals and successive rebellions, to argue for a more dialectical concept of hegemony. It also takes issue with culturalist interpretations of rule, arguing instead for a historically nuanced political economy.