Being and becoming (of/with) Burawoy: An anxious apprehension of public sociology in South Asia

Teaching and doing

The last segment of the book depicts a professional sociologist’s quest of Eric Wright’s (2010) ‘real utopias’, providing substances for public sociology of a teacher. The central argument of this article, in sync with the hinge of the book, indelibly underlines the relationship of teaching and doing, being and becoming of a sociologist who would tirelessly show the relationship of professional, policy, critical, and public sociology. At least, in an ideal sense there ought to be an equilibrium in such a relationship unless a metaphorical Dorian Gray, alias sociologist and anthropologist, is at ease with the ugly pictures reflected in the mirror of sociology. The teacher accomplishes the idea of public sociology through the teaching program as much as it is central to the scholarly and research-based knowledge. Driven by an ever relevant fundamental question, ‘Knowledge for whom? Knowledge for what?’ (Wright, 2010: 162), Burawoy narrates the complications encountered as a professional sociologist while heading an international body such as the American Sociological Association. It leads us to hear about the limits and possibilities of policy and critical sociology, nature and scope of universities, commodifications of knowledge, and teaching programs. There is a healthy symbiosis of teaching and doing that enables Burawoy to suggest, ‘public sociology does not succeed by simply postulating alternative visions’ (Wright, 2010: 205). The success of it, rather, dwells upon manifold dialogues, among stakeholders in the civil society, and teachers, students, assistants in the teaching and learning program. In such a mode, teaching theories amounts to doing public sociology in which, approach to theories is ethnographic (relationship of theories, theorists, learner, teacher, and larger socio-historical context). This is starkly different from the worldwide survey method of teaching and learning that merely follows the names and titles of theories, canons of concepts. Burawoy promotes an art of theories in which pictorial (geometrical shapes) depictions of the understanding occur in the relationship of the present rather than past, of the living rather than dead and museumized. Teaching theories is akin to living theories in public sociology! This poses a challenge to not only common sense of the present but also the assumption that prevailed upon the theories of the classical age. Needless to say, this implies understanding the available theories replete with the incongruities for well-humored and critical rethinking. Such a critique of Marxism is part of the larger endeavor to underline the limitations of the professional sociology, and necessitates a somewhat anti-sociological push arising from the critical sociology in which not only theories but also methods are subject to transformations. The professional Marxists in South Asia, typically characterized by the office hours (alias ‘10 am to 5 pm Marxists’), may fail to fathom the existential intricacies of working class and thereof socialism. They may be parroting the unexperienced qua scientific ideas. Burawoy is unlike them in the quest of ‘real utopias’ that set the ball of reforms rolling, enhances the pursuit of decommodifications, for ‘restoring the social of socialism’ (Wright, 2010: 177). With Burawoy’s public sociology it is possible to shift from The Communist Manifesto (Marx’ and Engel’s) to The Great Transformation (Polanyi’s), performing radical surgery to the theory and practice. He builds upon his friend and Marxist sociologist Eric Wright’s (2010) ways to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century, to propose the following actions, ‘diagnose the defects of capitalism, develop a treatment of real utopias, and apply the treatment through strategies of social transformation’ (p.169).

With such intellectual openness, against the large variety of narrowness, there emerges enormous possibilities. Methodologically, Burawoy builds upon the unity of sociology and anthropology which have been colonially separated for the benefits of vested interests. Across the universities in the region of South Asia such a separation has resulted into formations of disciplinary silos aplenty. As a result a flawed textbook idea that sociology studies complex societies and anthropology simpler ones, seems to rule the roost of commonsense of both the laypersons as well as the so-called experts. Uninformed by some of the early debates on the relationship of both in the postcolonial contexts, as well as the presence of the palpable intertwining in the classical works, sociologists and anthropologists in South Asia tend to subscribe to a mindless variety of gatekeeping. To exacerbate the situation, there are various subdisciplines within these disciplines which do not seem to talk to each other, let alone the much mouthed and lipserviced notion of interdisciplinarity.

Using the strands of conventions however Burawoy adopts an approach that allows to join ethnography (an understanding of the micro) with Marxism (an understanding of the macro), anthropology and sociology. There has been hackneyed idea of participant observation in sociology and anthropology in South Asia, ever since the advent of the field-work which is subject to a meaningful change as Burawoy adopts the method of ‘observant participation’ at the factories where he worked. He is informed by the philosophy of science and a critical understanding of the limitations of both, the presiding grand theories as well as the grounded theories emperilled by bland empiricism. The fad of rejecting theories needed a methodological antidote which emerged through, in Burawoy’s public sociology, ‘a dialogue between theory and data that ended not in the discovery of theory but its reconstruction’ (p. 129). It is a qualitatively distinct variety of postpositivist lens vis-à-vis ordinary data, in which dialogically (between student and teacher, or between the researcher and the field) a novel idea of ethnography develops. In such a cultivated methodological practice, also called ‘the extended case method’, a researcher ought to undertake the threefold actions: ‘extend the observer to the participant’, ‘extend observation over time and space’, and finally, ‘extend theory’. Besides, such a methodological innovation is integrally connected with a comparative method in sociology inclined to exploring global dimensions of a reality. This was a cumulative arrival for Burawoy who had engaged with the works of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, considering, ‘racial capitalism is not a “thing” but a methodology, situating the study of racism within an analysis of capitalism’ (p. 118). This is all so significant to highlight since there is seldom a thought on methodological play or conceptual adventure in sociology in South Asia. The latter is where theories, concepts, methods, and overall way of seeing is all about peppering the empirical data with the textually given sophistication.

Through his early career, Burawoy as a public sociologist in the making had already understood the deeper sociological issues behind the apparent mathematical calculations. Not only the typical Marxist explanations on the political economy of the conditions and constraints, the inclination was to unearth the subjectivities of the working class, role of the cultural and stereotypical in determining the relations of production, and the companionship of coercion and consensus underneath the choices made by the workers inter alia. At this point, it is relevant to ask, how does Burawoy come to his intellectual, sociological, and biographical destinations?

Becoming and being

The book offers aplenty on the life of a public sociologist through the maze of historically structured class interests and the truncated process of becoming. As an afterthought, one flips through the pages perhaps one more time, to find more juicy details of the personal, the being and becoming hosted together. A reader is left thirsty, and yet there is enough to munch on about the becoming of a policy, professional, critical, and public sociologist (no order intended). The hinge for the story is C Wright Mills’ sociological imagination (p. 33 and 208) in which biography and history unfold at once, though the casualty is, to reiterate, the details of emotional and sensorial becoming of a biography.

A bewildered student of mathematics, Burawoy chanced upon the French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s classical work, the book titled Suicide in the college library and found a ‘socioanalysis’ of a morbid phenomenon turning into ‘sociotherapy’ for his young mind. Ever since it was a sociology with moral commitment to the world, with theories rooted in a set of values – freedom, equality, solidarity! With initial efforts of distinguishing sociology from other fields of knowledge such as psychology, political economy or economics, philosophy inter alia, the sway of professionalism grew strong and an internal division of labor was established. This meant a grotesque and perhaps ill-envisioned separation of professional, policy, critical, and public sociology. Amid such a critical realization Burawoy discovered, who he called ‘the greatest public sociologist of the twentieth century’, W E B Du Bois. The latter was ‘the inspiration for a renewal of sociology that is in danger of losing its bearings in the welter of neoliberalism and the centrifugal forces at work within the division of disciplinary labor’ (p. 14). Though aware of Raewyn Connell’s criticism of the limited vision of the classical sociologists, Burawoy developed an understanding of the dialectic of utopia and anti-utopia mapping the trinity of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, or to put it succinctly, from morals (in Durkheim’s sociology) to mobilization (in Marx’s sociology). In between, Du Bois offered a publicly engaged and historically embedded sociological reasoning on the intersection of class and race. Though this may not have satisfied Zygmunt Bauman (2000) who would problematize the adherence to the Enlightenment ethos in classical sociology, there is an evident merit in the trajectory. The merit lay in the emphasis on the possibility of reconstruction in the light of the sociological understanding of the rise, spread, and advances of capital and the transformation in the everyday life of the ordinary, the workers.

Burawoy’s learning was punctuated by working in various professional capacities, for example, as a researcher in language politics riddled India, as a journalist in apartheid affected South Africa, as worker on the shopfloors of various factories, as an intrigued activist cum researcher in the fast changing Soviet Russia. The work informed knowledge and vice versa, translating into an inexorable process of more learning and unlearning. This amounts to a vital proposition that sociologists ought to work in various capacities outside the academic precincts of higher education, research symposium, as well as associations of peers. One cannot be a theorist and empiricist as two separable creatures, nor can a sociologist afford to be merely scholarly without a touch of messy lived experience. The academic vocation is never credible without a sociologist dirtying hands in the experiential domains of work.

Experiential learning, in addition to the book-view cultivated through reasoned critical readings of the canons, enabled Burawoy to perceive a pervasive tendency in both, policy and professional sociology. Both tend to be by and large sponsored by the determining forces of a time, giving rise to an ‘anti-political’ ‘technical expertise’. By being complicit in such sociological endeavors, and self-reflexive realization of the limitations, a sociologist understood the importance of the deeper currents and countercurrents, intuitive and counterintuitive understanding. While exploring the status and preference of languages in India and Zambianization of the mining workforce in Zambia along the racial-colonial color bars, a traditional kind of public sociologist was writing to engage with public in a limited way. After working for a year and half with the Copperbelt, Burawoy decided to do MA in sociology and anthropology at the University of Zambia, which was integral to Franz Fanon’s framework of National Bourgeoisie Road for upward mobility. He was not only learning sociology but also participating in the students’ mobilization as well as the activities of the sociological association in Zambia. With a prior exposure to American, specially the Chicago variety, sociology was Marxism’s Siamese twin in the postcolonial context which in implication meant, ‘theories become actors in political arena: ideologies that justify the existing array of institutions, constellations of interests, and the distribution of power; utopias that grip people’s imagination and thereby propel collective action’ (p. 81). Unlike the limited understanding of race in Chicago, Burawoy had a broad view of racially mixed execution of interests and subjective dispositions in the backdrop of ‘Bantustans’, internal colonies run by the chiefs that created a dependent African middle class. A work in critical sociology, Burawoy’s dissertation explored ‘the patterning of race and class within the economy’ that ‘was shaped by a racialised superstructure’, disclosing a fine symbiosis of economic base and superstructure. This was an opening of the public sociology in relations and contestation with available theories. This was furthermore a marker of Burawoy’s reasoned departure from the then prevalent theories of modernization, limited understanding of the industrial sociology, simplistic explanation of the migration of labor. In the 1970s Burawoy was enrolled in Chicago for further studies, where he was to weave his anthropological lessons with sociological studies. Adopting a comparative approach he looked at both subjective dimensions of the labor in California and South Africa. This was following his year-long stint of working as a machine operator at a multinational corporation Allis-Chalmers in south of Chicago. Engaging with the structural hegemony, coercion and consensus, he was aiming at the real blackbox, the socio-cultural subjectivities and stereotypes in the backdrop of the ‘game’ of labor, or a labor of game that while reproducing the relations of production adds a subjective dimension to it. The Gramscian hegemonic regime of production received nuanced detailing that led to a much needed rethinking of the Marxian ideas. As Burawoy puts,

contrary to Marxist thinking of the time, the disorganisation of the working class took place not only in the realm of superstructures, through education, parties, religion, community, and family, but at the very point of production where class consciousness was supposed to congeal. Thinking that this hegemonic regime of production would be the bedrock of stability under advanced capitalism, I looked to the Global South for patterns of destabilization that might give concrete expression to utopian vision (p. 108).

The book thus allures a reader, or anyone remotely or closely related to sociology, to return to the enormously enriching body of scholarship accredited to Burawoy, not only through his biographical journey but also pitching in everyone’s own! Along with Burawoy every reader ought to be asking, knowledge for whom and for what, unless the intellectual prisonhood is a fait accompli as in the struggles of intellectual class in the fast receding civil societies of South Asia. Burawoy, in contrast, presents a narrative of possibilities through the bottlenecks of the professionalized practices. Be it in his induction for a teaching ‘job’ at Berkeley, his consistent teaching and research program putting together policy, professional, critical and public parts of sociology, Burawoy remains a defiant, or a category of scholar elsewhere celebrated as ‘eccentric professor’ who remains active in the campus life of a university in spite of the pandemic and catalyzes thinking and doing beyond the fixed boxes (Pathak, 2022).

Sociology in South Asia

The whole of being and becoming, learning and doing, teaching and researching of a sociologist in this book amounts to a cardinal reminder about the nature and scope of the discipline. As Burawoy puts it summarily,

Sociology is caught between the possible and impossible: between the utopian imagination reaching beyond the constraints on human action and the anti-utopian science that reveals their existence and power. By ‘anti-utopian’ I don’t mean ‘dystopian’, which refers to an undesirable or ‘bad’ society, but the limits on the realisation of a ‘good’ society (p. 2).

Such a Janus-faced disciplinary field is available in the classical works of Durkheim, Weber, Marx, or if one wishes to add more such names including Saint Simon and Simmel, or even in some of the forerunners of sociology who Durkheim had aptly acknowledged such as Montesquieu and Rousseau. The modernity of sociology is integrally connected with a typical modernity of the colonial and postcolonial India in which universal and local, traditional and contemporary, textual and contextual come together. There is a fertile in-betweenness that allows a sociologist to explore a possible social transformation and reconstruction without losing sight of the limits and constraints. Elsewhere, there was another synonym for this in-betweenness, in ambivalence of modernity in a postcolonial society (Pathak, 1998, 2004). This is still a far more innocuous kind of ambivalence than the one portrayed by Bauman (1990) elsewhere, since it was more inclined toward reconstruction than a poststructuralist deconstruction. Sociology as a progeny as well as vehicle of modernity had to deal with the utopian aspirations while struggling with the anachronistic anomalies and carrying the insights from the traditions of knowledge in Indian subcontinent. The utopias of swaraj (a tradition of idea represented in modern thinking of M K Gandhi) freed from the structures of inequality and exclusion of a Hindu society (a tradition of heterodoxy represented in B R Ambedkar’s vision) were prevalent in India. The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru endeavored with his kind of collective at the helm of affairs to give such a utopia more of a nation-building framework, which was historically articulated as a tryst with destiny of an independent India. The advent of sociology and anthropology in the subcontinent was loaded with the utopian quests accompanied with the scientific qua empirical understanding of the limits and constraints. Sociology succumbed to the policy thrust of the nation-building program, eventually nonetheless, there were earnest attempts to understand the social structures to postulate the possible swaraj in ideas, epistemology, reason, and practices of teachers and scholars. Sociological attempts to chronicle the history and practices of sociology and anthropology in India have offered both, a critique to highlight the nationalist underpinnings of the early sociology and a celebration of the advent of the exploration of intellectual independence. This was the case particularly with reference to sociology and anthropology of Lucknow University, with the names of Radhakamal Mukerjee, A K Sharan, D P Mookerji, D N Majumdar, and so on (Madan, 2013; Thakur, 2014). The doyens have been more or less saved from the intellectual amnesia which, T N Madan lamented, prevails upon the institutionally hosted and nurtured professional sociology and anthropology in India. However, the nuances and propositions in the history of disciplines are seldom to be found in the contemporary practices. Attempts to render the insights, readings, and reasoning, from the disciplinary history, available for critical usages and execution are hard to find in the body of scholarships or in contemporary disciplinary practices. For all practical purposes, recalling the forgotten is a glowing ritual to celebrate the lost glory. Or, it is to support a liturgy of lament about the decline in standards that comes along with sociology’s ‘pluralising’ (Vasavi, 2011). The Burawoy idea that plural civil society and plurality of sociologies are inevitable twins, is perhaps yet to be learned in South Asia. We seek singularity in everything, values and perspectives, theories and concepts, methods and techniques, and above all in the academic standards and rigors. Standardized singularity is an intellectual fetish along which intellectual division of labor, or a bloated hierarchy, is inherently built in the discipline. Critique of Eurocentrism or colonialism of ideas could not wipe out the enslaved interests that a Malaysian sociologist Alatas (1972) had characterized as ‘captive minds’. Hence, we are mostly occupied in comparative evaluation of the works of the predecessors, either to ennoble or reject one over the other. Some readers of sociology put G S Ghurye on the higher pedestal, or M N Srinivas for instituting a fieldview against book-view, and some others hailed A R Desai for paving the way for the Marxist reading of various realities in sociology in India including nationalism (Das, 2001; Patel, 2011). A Fanonite revolution of independent ideas is somewhat a far cry in South Asia given the way of seeing the intellectual history and the contributions of the predecessors in sociology and anthropology. While many lament about the lack of theorizing, we ought to understand that there is little operationalization of the theoretical values of the predecessors’ works, and there is no attempt to render theories for the kind of pedagogic play conducive for the revisiting and reconstruction that Burawoy highlighted. Theories, along with pedagogy, or even research and writing, are yet to become political actors in the intellectual canvas of South Asia, though there have been attempts to see the direct correlation of sociology with Marxism. The affiliation with ideology and party politics is more or less an appendage of the professional and policy sociology which does not amount to formulation and quest of utopias. South Asia is typically that socio-political context where ideologies are unmatched with equally vigorous competing utopias, and as a result, there is seldom that bunch of ‘freefloating intelligentsia’, which was responsible for the intellectual and political advancement in Mannheim’s (1936) sociology of knowledge. In the name of sociological knowledge, the most pervasive is varied types of anti-political technical expertise, which Burawoy had to overcome following a typological formulation of knowledge and human interest. The latter was reminiscent of Habermas’ (1987) typological formulation in which critical, humanist, as well as instrumental qua utilitarian interests were described in relation to human interests.

More often than not sociology and anthropology in South Asia is less about the balance of varied human interests, or as Burawoy calls it, a dialectic of utopia and anti-utopia. There is hardly a reflection of personhood, the emotional and subjective underpinnings in teaching and research, let alone the dynamics of ideology and utopia, utopia and anti-utopia. Indeed, personhood of a sociologist and anthropologist is deemed such an avoidable anathema that any freefloating conversation with the scholars of eminence freezes beyond a point. They become self-referential only to refer to the writings that they have done, rather than enactments in everyday life that they performed. Such a divide of personal and professional, reminding of Gouldner’s (1971) discussion on the split personality of the positivist sociologists, is hitherto an integral component in the intellectual practices. Sociology and anthropology in South Asia seem to be truly a poor clone of the positivist social sciences of the Yoda age in which theories and concepts, methodology and ways of seeing, are from an envisaged nowhere land. Detachment, coupled with sly attachment, is a methodological bliss in sociology in South Asia. The only glimpse of personhood, in a truncated and strategic manner, is visible in the ‘networking’ process, in which scholars from South Asia seek legitimacy of their own being through an association with international names. Becoming of Burawoy however underscored the attachment and openness to the challenges triggered in critical, feminist, and theories of marginality. Be it as a youth or as a sociologist, he optimally utilizes the marginality and thereof struggle to push the boundaries, of discipline, of politics, of pedagogy, and affiliations. Like Burawoy, it was a sociology through personal-individual route for many among the first few generations of sociologists in India who were doing a normative or moral science. However, the sway of professional and policy sociology was so strong that the mantra of nation-building uncritically borrowed positivist framework from the grand theorists, and seduction of the status quo became a legitimate premise across South Asia (Sengupta, 1997). The services to a newly independent nation, à la nation-building narrative, are an inevitable imperative. Yet, succumbing to the limits of a nation in intellectual practices tells a tale about the limited value orientation and intellectual short-sightedness. This was a consolidation of policy and professional aspects of sociology in South Asia that undermined the growth of a public sociology in which words and actions, scholarship and personhood, could join hands. Even the persuasive calls for going beyond nation, toward an imperative internationalization (Patel, 2013), solicit a reflexive endeavor in which being and becoming of a sociologist ought to be as crucial a unit of analysis as the arrived destinations qua various forms of knowledge.

In lieu of conclusion

There need not be a conclusive conclusion about the being and becoming of a scholar, or of a critique of such a hermeneutics in the context of South Asia where disciplinary practices seem to be by and large stuck in an intellectual limbo. The latter may be recounted as crises, decline, and unbecoming, notwithstanding, there are possibilities aplenty buried in the chaos. The institutions (universities, regulatory bodies, funding agencies, market inter alia) have enacted policies, imposed, or engineered consensus, to order the disorder. One looks forward to the continuity of the quest, of being and becoming, which is less about resolving the disorder and more for multiple sociologies to unfold in the frame of critical dialogues beyond boundaries.