Abstract
What is the relevance of reading classical sociological thinkers in twenty-first century India? What does it mean to be a sociologist in the twenty-first century? What are the challenges for a twenty-first century sociologist? These are the major questions the author asks in this book, which is aptly titled Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. The major problem of teaching sociology in the Indian Universities is the lack of scholarly text books written by Indian scholars. Many of the books our graduate and postgraduate students read have been written by foreign scholars, thinking from their location and writing for a particular audience. Western scholars are not concerned with the questions of the relevance of Marx in the globalised Indian society, or the importance of Weber to understand the Indian bureaucracy and so on. From the pedagogic perspective, it is high time that our sociologists and social scientists write books on important thinkers showing its relevance in our society. The present book is a welcome step in this context. The author is a renowned Indian sociologist, who has been teaching a course on Classical Sociological Thinkers for more than two decades now. The major aim of this book is to gravitate graduate and postgraduate students to read original texts. As she says: ‘having taught sociology in the class room for 27 years, it seemed to me that what a text book intends to do is essentially gravitate the students towards the originals’ (p. 183).
There has always been a debate in India about the non-efficiency of Indian scholars in theory building and formulation. Indian sociology has witnessed a large body of critical scholarship on the domination of the West in social theory. They have questioned the western stereotypical understanding of Indian scholars as native informants/informers and the western scholars as theoreticians. The author has a different take on this debate. The author writes in the introductory chapter:
There has always been a raging debate among Indians that we are not very efficient as theory builders, with that “generalising principle”, so dear to sociologists. I have never allowed myself to be swamped by the sense of inadequacy, primarily because to me, it seems that Indians have been excellent ethnographers who have shown that western theory may or may not applicable in our situation. It is therefore, an ongoing dialogue, where our empirical contexts and western theory are in a ceaseless conversation (p. xii).
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter discusses the major themes and debates in sociological thinking, which is titled as Theory and Its Interlaced Contexts: Reading Sociology in terms of Wisdom and Community. The author discusses the importance of the works of Roland Barthes and Saussure and shows how sociology has changed with the arrival of linguistic turn and postmodernism. It is here she discusses the importance of literature. What is literature? She explains: ‘all writing that lasts, and is relevant over large spans of time without seeming out-dated, constitutes a body of literature’ (p. 4). The author goes on to argue that sociologists have produced great literature. ‘It is impossible to read Marx’s German Ideology, for instance, without coming to terms with the sheer brilliance and clarity of his style. Even with the crumbling of communist states here and there, Marx’s writing is read the world over, both for its understanding of capital as well as the way in which the narrative of history and peoples is articulated. There may be fewer takers for the view that Emile Durkheim or Max Weber provides the same quality of colour and vibrancy. Yet, as a body of literature that survives time, the resilience of Sociologists as litterateurs cannot be denied. To write about marriage and children, property and death is the subject of sociological recording. To write well about the everydayness of existence, that is another talent entirely. But to be sociologists one must be a writer. To teach, one must write’ (p. 4). What is the role of literature in sociology? How important is literature in sociological thinking? Being a writer herself and author of five books of fiction she argues that writing fiction is a legitimate form of writing sociology. She says: ‘The writing of fiction, I find, is one of the most interesting meta-languages that sociology can use, and that it is a legitimate form of writing Sociology, has never been doubted by Universities, wherever sociologists have appeared as writers of fiction’ (p. 6). She discusses how feminism had played a major role in questioning some of the myths in mainstream sociology. After introducing the debates on subjectivity and objectivity, feminist discourse and the works of Durkheim the author went on to discuss her ethnographic data to show how one can engage with these theories.
In the second chapter, author engages with the question of Max Weber and the problem of subjectivity. After discussing the central theoretical arguments based on the writings of Karl Manheim and Weber, she argues:
…what twenty-first century sociology attempts to do is to record, to bear witness, to be objective in delineating the crises of our time. In this respect, the Weberian method is crucial. It reflects on explanation and understanding as the key variables and argues that sociologists must believe that, even if they do not understand, the phenomenon must be described or recorded so that its existence as phenomenon is noted (p. 40).
The author covers in brief most of the relevant concepts and ideas in the writings of Max Weber along with the discussion of other relevant thinkers.
The third chapter is called Reading Karl Marx in a Modern Context. The basic question the author asks in this chapter is, ‘why is the work of Marx important today? For the author, the analytical tools that Marx provides to sociologists are more interpretative than ideological’ (p. 63). She discusses the relevant works of Marx and shows how these ideas are relevant now, and discusses the works of Sartre, Engels, C.W. Mills, Durkheim and others to show how these distinct theories can talk each other to understand and explain a problem. She concludes the chapter by stressing the importance of sociologists as record keepers ‘when we record the voices of people, we add to the materials provided by the state and archives, we contribute to objectivity by sharing the task of remembrance as being collective, rather than merely elitist, or ideological or social’ (p. 86).
In the fourth chapter, the author engages with the themes of division of labour, authority, legitimacy and bureaucracy. Along with the discussion of Durkheim and Weber the author also engages with the relevant Indian texts in order to connect with the everyday reality of Indian situation. The author explicates the concepts of collective representation, social fact and solidarity and tries to show how we can understand them in our context covering examples from India. The author concludes the chapter by arguing that the local histories intermeshed with the global narratives of development is an important subject for the twenty-first century sociology (p. 102).
The fifth chapter is about the Internet, and how the Internet is a major realm for sociologists to engage with. The author starts the chapter with a brief discussion of Paul Ricour and says reading electronic text is the preoccupation of the twenty-first century (p. 103). In order to explain the importance of Internet as a text she discusses the works of Barthes, Shills and others to show how these theories help to understand this new text. As sociologists, how do we see cyber crimes? What is privacy in the Internet era? These are the questions the author is preoccupied with this chapter. As critical thinkers our engagement with the Internet is very significant since it is a world not free from inequality and filled with different forms of domination and exploitation. This chapter is rich with various theoretical discourses on the question of narratives and text. The sixth chapter is about myths and legends, where the author discusses the complicated relationship between myths, legends, folktales and history. The author engages with various theoretical discussions on myths and legends ranging from Mauss to Bauman. The author argues that as soon as mythology loses its explanatory pretensions, its reality becomes solely religious and symbolic in nature. This is myth as myth, expressing the sacred connotation of religious explanation. It divided the world into believers and sceptics, but as religious code it is an acceptable part of modernism, where segmentalisation is chronic (p. 151).
Chapter six is about the question of religion and secularism. Here the author tries to show the contradictory nature of Indian secularism and goes on to say that in the everyday life the symbols of politically practiced Hinduism became somewhat compulsory (p. 162). Nevertheless, the author argues that the choice of faith and acceptance with respect for all religions is the most interesting aspect of Indian secularism (p. 162). Yet we know how the Muslims in India have to show their ‘secular’ identity in order to prove that they are not ‘Islamic terrorists’. Has India’s secularism been successful? This is the question sociologists and social anthropologists need to study seriously through fieldwork. The author invites the reader to think about it. The author’s own earlier works engage with the question of religion, tradition and the importance of dialogue especially in The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual Among the Yakoba (1993), and Friendship Interiority and Mysticism: Essays in Dialogue (2007). The author stresses on the need of having a dialogic understanding as a solution to many of our present day problems. The author argues that, when we think of the dominance of Hinduism, as a political strategy of consensus in politics, in India, we know that the real wedges of interaction, come from the understanding that the ‘other religions’ do have very serious stakes in making their presence felt. This may be in terms of dialogic process which includes interfaith conventions, or in break away or separatist movements. However the economics of survival depend on interaction and exchange (p. 182). The book engages with a wide variety of theoretical discourses and thinkers, not merely Marx, Weber and Durkheim, which makes it different from other text books on classical sociological thinkers. The author encourages the reader to engage with the original writings of classical sociological thinkers through this book. It is undoubtedly a valuable and challenging book for students and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, and cultural studies. However, one hopes that the publishers paid more attention taking care to avoid minor spelling mistakes and typo errors in this significant book.