Books on the topic 'Order of Social Scientists (India)'

The author of the monograph, written on the original material, restores the classical scientific social philosophy, which allows the means of dialectical methodology and materialism in sociology to predict the end of the prehistory of antagonistic epochs and the beginning of the true history of a single humanity. The new industrialization at the moment of transition from prehistory to history creates civilizational neo-industrialism as a dialectical synthesis of traditional civilization and progressive formation in the form of new socialism. The global project of neo-industrialism civilizes humanity — saves it from barbarism, wars, social inequality, and the destruction of nature. In historical Russia, civilizing development is realized at the expense of new industrialization and the solution of general democratic tasks with the transition to post-capitalist tasks. Conceptually, civilizational neo-industrialism acts as the fifth world theory, which makes it possible to understand the future of the dialectic of new social forces in the transition from prehistory to history. It is of interest to postgraduates, researchers and a wide range of readers in order to determine the worldview position, clarify the philosophical base of science and search for scientists, understand the dialectics of social existence and social consciousness.

After the upheavals of the French Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers were blamed for loosening the bonds of society. In nineteenth-century France, Saint-Simon advocated a social compromise whereby scientists and artists planned the path of progress while the propertied classes retained political power albeit acting as trustees for the interests of the poor. Comte called for a scientific sociology to inform the design of political institutions. In Britain, Bentham rejected the doctrine of natural rights in favour of the principle of utility, while J. S. Mill flirted with Comte’s positivism briefly. Marx made little impact and socialism came in the guise of Fabianism and middle-class trusteeship for the poor. In Germany, Hegel interpreted the French Revolution as a phase in a moral struggle for freedom and called for freedom to be reconciled with the idea of the common good embodied in the state. List envisaged the common good as protectionist trade policy.

Does religion cause violent conflict, this book asks, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian–Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, this book examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is “religious” conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, the book additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. With such theories in mind, the book explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians. Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or “Hinduness,” explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, the book questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.

The constitution of India is not merely a law prescribing a division of power and limits to power, but contains a bill of rights and positive directions to the State to establish a just social order. It incorporates the essential aspects of parliamentary democracy, federalism, provisions regarding inter-state trade, and commerce, among other features. This chapter discusses the salient features of the Indian constitution, directive principles, separation of powers, constitutional amendment, judicial review, problems and methods of constitutional interpretation, positivist and structuralist interpretation, constituent assembly and the role of the judiciary, legal positivism of the early years, external aids to interpretation, resolution of conflicts between constitutional provisions, freedom of religion, powers and privileges of legislatures, affirmative action for the weaker sections of society, freedom of speech, property rights, post-emergency judicial activism, independence of the judiciary, the court as a political institution, and institutional and cultural factors underlying constitutional interpretation.

This book challenges monolithic cultural constructs and valorization of indigenous society. Marriage being a social act reveals a lot about society and its attitudes. A wide timeframe has been taken as social and cultural history defy a temporal straitjacket. The study of social and cultural history has been related to the political structure. Hence, the process of State formations and the emergence of Rajputs as a ruling clan have been studied. Matrimonial alliances played a crucial role in the formation of medieval polity and society. In the initial stages of State formation, there was an openness and accommodation but as state power increased, rulers tried to project themselves as protectors of normative order and inter-caste marriages disappeared whereas interreligious marriages continued to flourish. Marriage rituals, customs, and practices to a large extent reflected the clan nature of Rajput polity as well as their attempt to legitimize their authority by following Dharmshastric rituals. There were innovations in marriage rituals in order to deal with the exigencies of time. Sati and widowhood—two very visible forms of women oppression have been examined. Frequent deaths on the battlefield led to increasing numbers of widows. Though the ruling aristocracy encouraged the practice of Sati, the woman cannot be seen as passive victims of oppressive ideology. Women who committed Sati do not approximate to Pativratta nor were they marginalized entities. A great degree of pluralism is seen in marital morality and it is obvious that this wasn’t influenced by Dharamshastric injunctions. In the early stages of state formation one can observe moral elasticity. Although the caste and village panchayats played a role in regulating marital mores in the beginning, the State gradually emerged as the ultimate authority in regulating social life.

Tassa drumming is an Indo-Trinidadian art form of extraordinary originality and richness, combining technical virtuosity and innovative dynamism over a solid base of traditional repertoire and style. With more than one hundred semiprofessional groups performing on the island, tassa is heard at competitions and various other functions, and it is indispensable at Hindu weddings and the Muslim Hosay (Muharram) commemoration. This chapter discusses tassa drumming in its relation to North Indian counterparts and with regard to its present forms, styles, and social contexts. Formal analyses are presented both as timely documentation of this impressive and understudied art form and in order to advance arguments about its evolution and the nature of its incorporation of creole elements.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

This chapter deals with the way in which French social scientists study their fellow citizens’ national identity. Following Billig, national identity refers here to the way people feel “emotionally situated” within nations, whatever these emotions are; how and to what extent they believe that being French is part of their personal identity. Over recent decades, social scientists all over the world have investigated the complex feelings citizens have about their nations. In France, however, this issue has been somewhat overlooked. This disparity is a consequence of the political context and the role of social scientists in French public debates, as well as a legacy of Bourdieu’s work which has made them well aware of the power of categorization. As a conclusion, the chapter outlines a research agenda in order to overcome this sociological blind spot.

What has social science learned about the common good? Would humanists even want to alter their definitions of the common good based on what social scientists say? In this volume, six social scientists—from economics, political science, sociology, and policy analysis—speak about what their disciplines have to contribute to discussions within Catholic social thought about the common good. None of those disciplines talks directly about “the common good”; but nearly all social scientists believe that their scientific work can help make the world a better place, and each social science does operate with some notion of human flourishing. Two theologians examine the insights of social science, including such challenging assertions that theology is overly irenic, that it does not appreciate unplanned order, and that it does not grasp how in some situations contention among self-interested nations and persons can be an effective path to the common good. In response, one theologian explicitly includes contention along with cooperation in his (altered) definition of the common good.

This chapter discusses the philosophical viability of Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch’s proposed pragmatic-enlightened model of science advising, as well as the practical application of their proposed model to the case of climate science advising. Edenhofer and Kowarsch’s model makes central use of a cartographic metaphor—one in which scientists and policymakers craft and consider different scientific routes to various value-laden ethical, political, and social destinations. But the argument from inductive risk poses a significant challenge to the viability of the metaphor, and hence, to the workability of the model. The chapter opens with a discussion of the challenge that inductive risk poses for the pragmatic-enlightened model, and closes with a discussion of how stakeholder engagement must be reconceived in order to meet that challenge.

It is now a half-century since most countries on the African continent saw the end of colonial rule. The first sustained scholarly attention to decolonization was authored largely by social scientists in the 1950s, who focused on ruling elites, party politics, constitutional development, and the transfer of power. Their successors, in the 1960s–1970s, brought new interpretive tools to the study of decolonization, including dependency theory, in order to make sense of the contemporary realities of political instability and economic underdevelopment. Since the 1980s, historians have brought the insights of women’s history, labour history, and social history to the table in order to demonstrate that nationalist scripts were often written ‘from below’. More recently, a focus on political imagination and political cultures, as well as the utilization of comparative and transnational approaches, has worked to free decolonization from its moorings as either the triumphal ‘end’ of colonial history or the opening scene in a postcolonial tale of ‘what went wrong’.

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.

Sociologists are concerned with the way human behaviour is patterned. They look for plausible explanations of phenomena that strike them as important due to their objective prevalence in social life. This chapter outlines the social scientific tools for studying religion, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on a range of examples from sociology of religion it explores the significance of individuals’ dispositions on the one hand and opportunities they encounter in their everyday lives on the other. The overall argument emphasizes the need for more collaboration between social scientists and theologians, or religious studies scholars. It suggests that secular sociologists would do well to consider the possibility of change in gender relations within religious contexts, and religious scholars could learn from the sociological method of inquiry to understand better the structurally determined mechanisms which make the symbolic gender order so resistant to change.

Stephen Jay Gould, the biologist and author, once joked that were he an identical twin raised separately from his brother they could ‘hire ourselves out to a host of social scientists and practically name our fee’. In order to monetise Gould’s fantasy, one would want a form of twinship that could operate according to evidential, experimental, somatic and circumstantial ideals. And Gould admits that he and his brother would need to be viewed as ‘the only really adequate natural experiment for separating genetic from environmental effects in humans’. This chapter seeks to interrogate the evidential and experimental circumstances that may underpin the comic quips that guide modern biology. In human genetics, twins are used as experimental bodies that are made to matter in particular ways and for particular people; they become newly ‘animate’ for being enrolled into scientific research. Raised in cultures assumed to be alike or dissimilar, isolated by researchers for being valuable in the measured disentanglement of assembled molecular agents (which are sometimes distinguished from an assemblage referred to as an ‘environment’), twins achieve a status of experimental significance not just for what they do but also for what they are taken to be.

Equity and Access attempts to unravel the complex narrative of why inequities in the health sector are growing and access to basic health care is worsening, and the underlying forces that contribute to this situation. It draws attention to the way globalization has influenced India’s development trajectory as health care issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. The volume explains how state and market forces have progressively heightened the iniquitous health care system and the process through which substantial burden of meeting health care needs has fallen on the individual households. Twenty-eight scholars comprising social scientists, medical experts, public health experts, policy makers, health activists, legal experts, and gender specialists have delved into the politics of access for different classes, castes, gender, and other categories to contribute to a new field of ‘health care studies’ in this volume. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach within a broader political-economy framework, the volume is useful for understanding power relations within social groups and complex organizational systems.

This book considers how religion as the source of civilization transforms the fundamental bio-sociology of humans through language and the somatic exploration of religious ritual and prayer. It offers an integrative account of the nature of the human, based on what contemporary scientists tell us, especially evolutionary science and social neuroscience, as well as through the history of civilizations. Part I contemplates fundamental questions and assumptions: the current state of knowledge concerning life itself, the philosophical issues in that understanding, and how we can explain religion as the driving force of civilizations in the context of human development within an evolutionary perspective. Part II offers a reading of religions in three civilizational blocks—India, China, and Europe/the Middle East—particularly as they came to formation in the medieval period. It traces the history of how these civilizations have thematized the idea of life itself. It then takes up the idea of a life force in Part III and traces the theme of the philosophy of life through to modern times. On the one hand, the book presents a narrative account of life itself through the history of civilizations and, on the other, it presents an explanation of that narrative in terms of life.

Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, in 1968. He was deeply pessimistic about development prospects in Asia. The fifty years since then have witnessed a remarkable social and economic transformation in Asia – even if it has been uneven across countries and unequal between people – that would have been difficult to imagine, let alone predict at the time. This book analyses the fascinating story of economic development in Asia spanning half a century. The study is divided into three parts. The first part sets the stage by discussing the contribution of Gunnar Myrdal, the author, and Asian Drama, the book, to the debate on development then and now, and by providing a long-term historical perspective on Asia in the world. The second part comprises cross-country thematic studies on governments, economic openness, agricultural transformation, industrialization, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, education and health, employment and unemployment, institutions and nationalisms, analysing processes of change while recognizing the diversity in paths and outcomes. The third part is constituted by country-studies on China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, and sub-region studies on East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia, highlighting turning points in economic performance and analysing factors underlying success or failure. This book, with in-depth studies by eminent economists and social scientists, is the first to examine the phenomenal changes which are transforming economies in Asia and shifting the balance of economic power in the world, while reflecting on the future prospects in Asia over the next twenty-five years. It is a must-read.

The first cases of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) were identified toward the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China. Over the following months, this virus spread to everywhere in the world. By now no country has been spared the devastation from the loss of lives from the disease (Covid-19) and the economic and social impacts of responses to mitigate the impact of the virus. Our lives in South Africa have been turned upside down as we try to make the best of this bad situation. The 2020 school year was disrupted with closure and then reopening in a phased approach, as stipulated by the Department of Education. This booklet is a collective effort by academics who are Members of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and other invited scholars to help you appreciate some of the basic scientific facts that you need to know in order to understand the present crisis and the various options available to respond to it. We emphasise that the threat of infectious diseases is not an entirely new phenomenon that has sprung onto the stage out of nowhere. Infectious diseases and pandemics have been with us for centuries, in fact much longer. Scientists have warned us for years of the need to prepare for the next pandemic. Progress in medicine in the course of the 20th century has been formidable. Childhood mortality has greatly decreased almost everywhere in the world, thanks mainly, but not only, to the many vaccines that have been developed. Effective drugs now exist for many deadly diseases for which there were once no cures. For many of us, this progress has generated a false sense of security. It has caused us to believe that the likes of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which caused some 50 million deaths around the world within a span of a few months, could not be repeated in some form in today’s modern world. The Covid-19 pandemic reminds us that as new cures for old diseases are discovered, new diseases come along for which we are unprepared. And every hundred or so years one of these diseases wreaks havoc on the world and interferes severely with our usual ways of going about our lives. Today’s world has become increasingly interconnected and interdependent, through trade, migrations, and rapid air travel. This globalisation makes it easier for epidemics to spread, somewhat offsetting the power of modern medicine. In this booklet we have endeavoured to provide an historical perspective, and to enrich your knowledge with some of the basics of medicine, viruses, and epidemiology. Beyond the immediate Covid-19 crisis, South Africa faces a number of other major health challenges: highly unequal access to quality healthcare, widespread tuberculosis, HIV infection causing AIDS, a high prevalence of mental illness, and a low life expectancy, compared to what is possible with today’s medicine. It is essential that you, as young people, also learn about the nature of these new challenges, so that you may contribute to finding future solutions.