Source: http://oldcscs.freecrow.com/html/PhD0506.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 14:33:46+00:00

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This course is intended to explore some of the ways in which we might theorise the connections between democracy and culture in contemporary India. It will also serve as an introduction to the kind of inter-disciplinary research being done at CSCS.
This course aims at exploring the interplay between culture and Law-Rights in such a way that certain interdisciplinary concerns in the research and teaching of law in general, and legal theories and philosophies in particular in regular law schools and departments, are addressed. The course however does not have a clear hypothesis. It is exploratory in nature and addresses four themes, which I believe are important, and could potentially not only illuminate our understanding on them but also redefine legal pedagogic engagement. The first theme explores into the histories and philosophies of “path-making” in modern law with the help of a set of critical texts with a view to critically reflect on the question of ‘normativity’. Similarly the second theme will address what is by now a well-explored theme in cultural studies, viz., “cultural translations and the problem of intelligibility”. I hope the readings chosen for the theme adequately represent the complexity of the issue and also help us grapple with the core concerns. The third theme broadly looks at the contributions of anthropologists to the understanding of custom and law, including the negotiations of rules and laws outside the realm of state. The fourth theme attempts at addressing some of the keenly contested contemporary concerns in law and society studies such as the imaginations of “secularism” and identity politics.
Gulbenkian Commission, Open The Social Sciences, 1991.
Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds. Law in the Domains of, chs. 1 and 2.
Robin West, “Disciplines, Subjectivity and Law” in Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds, The Fate of Law.
Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India. Ch. III.
Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth’”.
Ronen Shamir and Daphna Hacker, “Colonialism’s Civilising Mission: The Case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission”.
Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles.
Sally Engle Merry, “Resistance and Cultural Power of Law.
Alan Hunt, “The Role of Law in the Civilizing Process and the Reform of Popular Culture”.
R.S. Khare, “Indigenous Culture and Lawyer’s Law in India”.
Robert Porter, “Strengthening Tribal Sovereignty through Peacemaking: How the Anglo-American Legal Tradition Destroys Indigenous Societies”.
Upendra Baxi, Future of Human Rights, ch. 3.
Satish Sabharwal, in Satish Sabharwal and Hieko Seivers eds., Laws, Rules and Constitutions.
Sumit Guha, in Satish Sabharwal and Hieko Seivers eds., Laws, Rules and Constitutions.
Sally Falk Moore, “Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949-1999”.
Clifford Geertz, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective”.
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function of Primitive Society, chs. XI and XII.
A.I. Pershits, “The Primitive Norm and Its Evolution”.
Carol Greenhouse, “Looking at Culture, Looking for Rules”.
Bernard Cohn, “Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in India”.
Donald R. Davis, Jr. “Recovering the Indigenous Legal Traditions of India”.
Sumit Guha, “Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country: Antiquity, Custom and Power in Eighteenth Century India”.
Anna-Maria Marshall and Scott Barclay, “In Their Own Words: How Ordinary People Construct the Legal World”.
Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India, Part II.
Sarah Leah Whitson, “Lok Adalats: An Experiment in Informal Dispute Resolution in India”.
Essays by Ashish Nandy, Rajeev Bhargava and Donald Smith in Rajeev Bhargava (ed), Secularism and its critics, (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998).
(i) Everson v. Board Of Education Of Ewing 330 US 1 (1947).
(ii) Wisconsin v. Yoder 32 L.Ed.2d 15.
(iv) Text of Indian constitution Arts. 25-28.
(v) The Commissioner Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Laxmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Shirur Mut AIR 1954 SC 282.
(vi) S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994) 3 SCC 1.
(vii)Sastri Yagnapurushadji And Others v. Muldas Bhudardas Vaishya AIR 1966 SC 1119.
(viii) Ramesh Yashwant Prabhoo (Dr.) v. Prabhakar K. Kunte, (1996) 1 SCC 130.
(ix) State of Karnataka v. Praveen Togadia 2004 (4) SCC (May 14th).
Guyora Binder and Weisberg, “Cultural Criticism of Law”.
Course Requirements: Classroom presentations and a term paper.
Mary Olympe de Gouges, “The Rights of Women”. In French Feminism: An Indian Anthology, ed. Danielle Haase-Dubose, Marcelle Marini, Rama Melkote, Susie Tharu.
J.S. Mill. “The Subjection of Women”, Chapter 3. In On Liberty and Other Writings. Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Tarabai Shinde, “A Comparison between Women and Men”.
Excerpts from Katherine Mayo, Selections from Mother India and Muthulakshmi’s response to Mayo.
Gender and Politics in India. Ed. Nivedita Menon.
Malavika Karlekar, “Woman’s Nature and the Access to Education,” Socialization, Education and Women: Explorations.
Kalpana Ram, “Rationalism, Cultural Nationalism and the Reform of the Body Politics: Minority Intellectuals of the Tamil Catholic Community”, in Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi, Sage, 1996, pp. 291- 318.
Gabriela Dietrich, “Women and Religious Identities in India after Ayodhya” in Against All Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan, ed. Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon and Nighat Said, pp.35-50.
Valentine M. Moghadam, “Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate,” Signs. Vol. 27, no.4 (Summer 2002):1135- 1171.
Amina Wadud, “Towards a Quranic Hermeneutics of Social Justice: Race, Class and Gender,” Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 12, no.1(1995-1996): 37-50.
This course will explore, largely through Foucault’s posthumously published volumes of lectures at the College de France, questions involved in conceptualizing a history of objects, practices, knowledges and problematizations. What Foucault undertakes historically is not what history as a discipline is equipped to deal with. Foucault is using history or historical material genealogically to come to terms with problems that are philosophical. He often characterizes his genealogical investigations as an attempt to arrive at a “history of truth” or as an attempt “to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live.” We will study Foucault’s project as providing us with a “conceptual story” of the West, a story that will transform our understanding of the role of history, philosophy and, more generally, the human sciences in the constitution of the West as a culture. We will seek theoretical and methodological clarity about this project by focusing on three themes.
1) genealogy and history: how does Foucault distinguish genealogy from history, since the material and often the method Foucault uses are historical? How does genealogy decide what objects or domains require genealogical analysis?
2) problematization and normativization: what is “problematization” and what is its relationship to “truth” and “norm”? What is the relationship between, on the one hand, practices and knowledge of practices and, on the other hand, truth and norm?
3) intellectual knowledge and spiritual knowledge. How does Foucault distinguish one from the other? How is Foucault’s study of them different from how a historian of ideas or a philosopher would study them? What is the status of Foucault’s own genealogy, in relation to the human sciences that are the objects of his investigation and in relation to the types of knowledges he is trying to understand?
We will also indirectly be asking how Foucault’s project could be of help in telling a “conceptual story” of India.
We will mainly be using The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Society Must be Defended, and Abnormal along with some books and articles that draw from these lectures. The decision to use the lectures as the main material is based on the fact that each of these lecture volumes is far richer in insight and cover more ground methodologically and theoretically than the corresponding book. Also, since these lectures are as it were intermediate between “raw” research and the “finished” product, they give us a lively sense of an acute thinker conveying the excitement of research to his audience (there is also the hope that this might make my pedagogical task a little easier). We will, however, be looking closely at some of his books and essays too. Ultimately, of course, it is my interpretation of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory that provides the justification for my choice of texts and problems; my contribution to the course itself can be seen, explicitly when needed but most often implicitly, as providing the justification for my interpretation. How much material we cover and how deeply we will explore the issues will depend almost entirely on the interest and commitment you bring to the class.
Course requirements: written notes for each class is recommended; one presentation; one paper (3000-5000 words) that addresses the themes or problems discussed in the course.
General introduction: Map of the issues and arguments to be covered.
The importance of Foucault—The trajectory of his work— “The permanent anthropologism of the West—“The historical ontology” of the West. If you have the time, I recommend that you read “What is Enlightenment?” and “About the Beginning of The Hermeneutics of the Self” (in Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture) for the first session itself.
The next five weeks we will work through the first group of readings with HS as our major focus. Although the text is rather long (about 500 pages), it’s eminently accessible. However, you may omit lectures 3, 4, 22, 23, 24. Begin reading UP and FS concurrently.
Intellectual knowledge and spiritual knowledge—Care of the self in antiquity—Christian transformation of the Greek-Roman problematics—Dietetics, economics, erotics, wisdom—Truthtelling and Subjectity, Ethics and Morality---Normativization.
Short student presentations in weeks 5, 6.
(If the course has picked up momentum, we might be able to finish this group of reading in 4 weeks).
The central text for this phase, SMD, is a bit tough-going. The other texts, however, are relatively straightforward and short.
Secularization of Western Culture?—History and Politics—Race and Class—Characterizing governmentalization—Genealogy and history.
Presentations in week 10, 11.
Both the texts are relatively easy.
Secularization at work—bodies and in-depth Christianization—Body and Flesh—Scientia Sexualis—Self, Truth and Confession—Scientism of human sciences.
Experience, Truth and Norm: Reconstrction of the road traversed. Theoretical and methodological implications of Foucault’s characterization of Western experience.
The psychoanalytic conception of selfhood: the processes of splitting, externalisation, phantasy, identification and idealisation as defences of the ego. We will go into some detail into symbolic production, its perceived role, and the strongly transactional nature of subjectivity.
The location of objectivity in history: the ‘objectification of man by the state’. The rise of the citizen as an apparatus for defining object-relations. The conception and role of the nation in situating and narrativising tranactional subjectivity. National space as a space for projection and the state’s intervention into protocols of how to recognise and project/introject objectivity in order to establish an apparatus of discipline.
Techologies of objectivity-production: the arrival of technologies of reproduction and mediation of reality precisely at the interface of objectivity, as a means for efficient production of symbolic form. We shall investigate Renaissance painting in some detail, especially on the theory of the vanishing point, the perception of reality as constituting a perennial loss. We shall also investigate the European perception of the cinema, as a machine of visibility-production and its regurgitation of reality, on the field of this loss.
S. Freud: From The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘The Work of Displacement’, ‘The Means of Representation’, ‘Conditions of Representability’.
From On Metapsychology (v 11, the Pelican Freud Library), ‘The Unconscious’, pg 161-222.
E. Panofsky, ‘History of the Theory of Human Proportions’, from Meaning in the Visual Arts.
N. Bryson, From Vision and Painting, ‘The Natural Attitude’, ‘The Essential Copy’ and ‘Perceptualism’.
S. Freud, From Art & Literature (v 14 The Pelican Freud Library)‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, pg 250-282.
Suggested Reading: Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism.
Hanna Segal, ‘Phantasy’, ‘Symbolism’, and ‘Mental Space and Elements of Symbolism’, in Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art, Pg 16-63.
Joseph Sandler and Meir Perlow, ‘Internalization and Externalization’ and Sandler, ‘The Concept of Projective Identification’, in Joseph Sandler ed. Projection, Identification, Projective Identification, London: Karnac Books, 1989, pg 1-13.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha: ‘Revisiting The View From the Teashop’. On the painting by Bhupen Khakhar.
Suggested background reading: Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, and Bhupen Khakhar: A Retrospective, National Gallery of Modern Art.
K. Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, v 3, Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, Collected Works.
Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ and Martin Thom, ‘Tribes Within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern France’, in Homi K. Bhabha ed. Nation and Narration, (pg 8-43).
Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, from Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambuiguous Identities.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.
K. Marx, ‘The Holy Family’, in v 4, Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, Collected Works.
Shailesh Kapadia, ‘Dreams of Govardhanram Tripathi: A Psychoanalytic View’, Occasional Paper, Centre for Social Studies, Surat, Dec 1992.
Susie Tharu, ‘Citizenship and its Discontents’ in John/Nair ed. A Question Of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India.
Romila Thapar, ‘Time as a Metaphor of History’, in Thapar, History and Beyond.
Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation in Heterogeneous Time’.
Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘Our Time: History, Sovereignty, Politics’.
F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pg 190-255. (Selected Works v 3).
D.D. Kosambi, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagavad Geeta’, in Myth And Reality.
Romila Thapar, ‘The Contribution of D.D. Kosambi to Indology’, in Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History.
Screening: Ritwik Ghatak, Ajantrik, and Meghe Dhaka Tara.
M. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’.
Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Laurentis and Stephen Heath (ed.) The Cinematic Apparatus, pg. 121-142.
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ‘Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue’, ‘Body Talk’ and ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation’ (pg 1-101).
Jean-Pierre Oudart, ‘Cinema and Suture’, Screen v 18 n 4 (1977-78).

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