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Provisional Relations, Indeterminate Conditions: Non-Sociological Sociality in South Asia

2016; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00856401.2016.1157567

1479-0270

Lotte Hoek, Ajay Gandhi,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

ABSTRACTIn the introduction to this special section, we present six ethnographic articles that explore the sites and forms of ‘non-sociological sociality’ in South Asia. Set in urban spaces where the familiar vectors of relations, such as ethnicity, class, gender or age, may be attenuated, the articles examine how social and political entanglement is suffused with ambiguity, indeterminacy, provisionality and contingency. In these sites, opaque conditions, open-ended play, double meanings and interpretive scrutiny abound. Spaces such as the racecourse, the bazaar, the university campus or the nocturnal street suggest undetermined conditions and fleeting collaborations which have a wider bearing on cross-cutting forms of sociality in South Asia.KEYWORDS: Ambiguityindeterminacyintelligibilityinterpretationprovisionalitysociality Notes1. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1970).2. Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).3. Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 73–120.4. Stanley Tambiah, Culture, Thought and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).5. Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and James M. Wilce, Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).6. Gerald Berreman, ‘Social Categories and Social Interaction in Urban India’, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 74, no. 3 (1972), pp. 567–86.7. Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).8. Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting: Micro-Politics in Kerala, South India’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1998), pp. 189–206.9. Veena Das and Jacob Copeman, ‘Introduction: On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation’, in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), no. 12 (2015) [https://samaj.revues.org/4063, accessed 20 Feb. 2016].